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I^ATIONAL POLITICS 







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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




JOHN HANSON 

'president of the united states in congress ASSEMBLED' 

{Oriyinal porlniil uiriicd ?>.// Doiighis It. Thoinuti) 



Maryland In National Politics 



y BY 

J. FRED'K ESSARY 

Waihington Correipondent of The Baltimore Sun; Editor of the 
Addresses and Essays of Isidor Rayner 



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JOHN MURPHY COMPANY 

Publishers 

Baltimore Maryland 



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Copyright, 1915, by 
J. PRED'K ESSARY 



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'^CI,A401118 



Press of John Murphy Company, Baltimore. Md. 



MAY 25 1915 
I 






This Volume 

Is Affectionately Dedicated 

To My Wife, 

HELEN K. ESSARY. 



INTRODUCTION 

This book was written with the idea of re- 
cording in some permanent form the splendid 
achievements of that group of Maryland pa- 
triots, statesmen, diplomatists and jurists who 
have contributed most to the greatness of the 
Republic, men whose public services estab- 
lished them as national characters, as contra- 
distinguished from purely State figures. 

In no sense is this a history of Maryland, 
nor is it a history of the United States. It is, 
however, a faithful presentation of the parts 
played in the nation's history by those distin- 
guished Marylanders of the past century who 
helped lay the foundation of this government, 
who have builded upon that foundation, who 
have made their country's laws and have had 
a potential influence in shaping its destiny. 

In dealing with the careers of these men the 
hard-and-fast lines of stereotyped biography 
have, in a measure, been abandoned. The 
places and dates of birth, the early education, 
the eccentricities of old schoolmasters, boy- 
hood pastimes and youthful love afifairs are, of 
course, affecting details, but they are not the 
circumstances in the lives of strong men that 
arrest attention and sustain the interest of those 



vi Introduction. 

who study success and honor greatness. It is 
the design of these sketches to comprehend the 
big vital facts concerning these illustrious 
Marylanders, facts that give them their true 
historical setting. 

No other work has come to my notice that 
treats, in this fashion, of Maryland's share in 
national politics. Biographies of a few of her 
individual statesmen have been written. Brief 
reviews of others are extant, but no previous 
efifort has been made, so far as I am aware, to 
assemble all the members of this famous com- 
pany in one volume, preserving in it a register 
of their service to the nation. 

I wish to take this opportunity to acknowl- 
edge my appreciation for the valuable assist- 
ance and advice given me in the preparation 
of these sketches by Judge Ashley M. Gould, 
Senator William E. Borah, Mr. Gist Blair, 
Dr. Samuel E. Forman, Mr. Arthur Peter, 
Mr. Douglas H. Thomas, Mr. William B. 
Rayner, Mr. Philip Francis Trippe, Mr. F. 
Julian Bailey, Mr. J. Henry Baker, General 
Thomas J. Shryock and many others. 

I may also add that I have consulted freely 
the published works of Bernard C. Steiner, 
J. A. J. Creswell, Frank Richardson Kent, 
Charles Francis Adams, Louis E. McComas, 
J.Thomas Scharf, Thomas Jeflerson and Mad- 



Introduction. vii 

ison Davis. The memoirs of Thomas H. Ben- 
ton, Gideon Welles, James G. Blaine, "Sunset" 
Cox, Shelby M. Cullom, Ben Perley Poore; 
the biography of Roger B. Taney, by Samuel 
Tyler, and that of William Wirt, by John P. 
Kennedy; the American histories of Henry 
Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson, John Bach 
McMaster, James Schouler, Julian Haw- 
thorne, James Ford Rhodes and E. Benjamin 
Andrews; the Journals of the Continental Con- 
gress and the Debates of the Constitutional 
Convention have been referrd to for the ac- 
curacy of many of the historical circumstances 
outlined in this book. 

J. Fred'k Essary. 
Washington, 1915. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

John Hanson: First President of the United 
States in Congress Assembled — Author of 
plan under which Articles of Confederation 
were ratified and Crown Lands were dedi- 
cated to the general government 1-17 

CHAPTER n. 

Charles Carroll of Carrollton : Commis- 
sioner to Canada during the Revolution — 
Last surviving Signer of the Declaration of 
Independence — First Senator and father of 
Ihe Assumption Act i8-37 

CHAPTER HL 

James McHenry : Secretary to General Wash- 
ington — Major in the Revolutionary Army — 
Chairman of the Maryland delegation in the 
Constitutional Convention and Secretary of 
War under Washington and Adams 38-57 

CHAPTER IV. 

Luther Martin : Member of the Constitutional 
Convention and of the Continental Congress 
— Counsel for Associate Justice Chase — De- 
fender of Aaron Burr in the trial for high 
treason 58-76 

CHAPTER V. 

Samuel Chase: Delegate in the Continental 
Congress — Federalist leader in the State — 
Associate Justice of the United States Su- 
preme Court and impeached by political 
enemies before the Senate 77-95 



X Contents. 

CHAPTER VI. 

General Samuel Smith : Hero of the War of 
1812 — Forty years a member of the Federal 
House and Senate — Insurgent against the 
Madison administration — President Pro 
Tempore of the Senate 96-1 1 1 

CHAPTER VII. 

William Pinkney : Diplomatic agent of the 
government at London, St. Petersburg and 
the Court of Naples — Twice a member of 
Congress — United States Senator — Attorney- 
General and leading advocate of his day. 112-133 

CHAPTER VIII. 

William Wirt : Prosecutor of Aaron Burr — At- 
torney-General through three administrations 
— Candidate for the Presidency against Jack- 
son and Clay on the anti-Masonic ticket. 134-154 

CHAPTER IX. 

Roger B. Taney : Attorney-General and Secre- 
tary of the Treasury under Jackson — Chief 
Justice of the United States Supreme Court — 
Author of the Dred Scott decision and of 
the first anti-trust opinion of the highest 
court 155-174 

CHAPTER X. 

Reverdy Johnson : Counsel in the Garland, 
Dred Scott, Cummings and Surratt cases — 
Attorney-General — United States Senator — 
Defender of Andrew Johnson and Minister 
to the Court of St. James 175-193 



Contents. xi 



CHAPTER XI. 



Henry Winter Davis : Founder of the Ameri- 
can party — A Representative in Congress — 
Uncompromising Unionist — Opponent of 
Lincoln — Greatest' orator of his time. . . 194-219 

CHAPTER XII. 

Montgomery Blair : Organizer of the Repubh- 
can party — Postmaster-General in Lincoln's 
Cabinet — Counsel in Scott and Cummings 
cases — Friend and counsel of Samuel J. 
Tilden — Defender of Belknap 220-242 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Arthur P. Gorman : Chairman of the Demo- 
cratic National Committee that elected Cleve- 
land — Democratic minority and majority 
leader in the Senate — Leader of the oppo- 
sition to the Force Bill — Joint Author of the 
Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act 243-263 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Isidor Rayner: Congressman and Senator — 
Counsel for Admiral Schley in the Naval 
Court of Inquiry — Leading authority in Con- 
gress upon Constitutional and International 
Law issues 264-286 

CHAPTER XV. 

Conclusion : Maryland's representation in 
twenty Cabinets, in the Diplomatic Corps, 
upon the United States Supreme Court — A 
century's record of leadership in the House 
and Senate of the United States — Figures in 
various Presidential contests 287-303 



JOHN HANSON 

1715— 1783 

Civilization accords no rarer privilege to 
the men who make history than the privilege 
of founding orderly government. Thousands 
there may be who have builded upon an order, 
once established; other thousands who have 
been privileged to defend it and to enjoy its 
usufructs, but there are only a few men whom 
all mankind honor as pathfinders, as bold pio- 
neers in the development of a system of human 
authority. 

And this is just as true of the American Re- 
public as it is of any of the governments that 
have gone before it or any that have come after 
it. A mere handful of figures stand out pre- 
eminently in the great struggle that gave this 
country its equality D 3re the world and its 
people their right to "life, liberty and the pur- 
suit of happiness." A vast multitude of men 
made sacrifices of their property, their blood 
and their lives that this end might be achieved, 
but oblivion has claimed ^11 but that small 
group of giants who complemented the work 
of the sword by welding the colonies into a 
confederation and the confederation into an 
indissoluble union. 



2 Maryland in National Politics. 

And as the revolutionary period recedes, as 
the perspective grows, interest in its dramatic 
events and in its dynamic personalities be- 
comes more and more absorbing. The men 
who made this republic possible; the men who 
laid its foundation upon deep and enduring 
lines; the men whose brain brought into be- 
ing the organic law of the United States are 
more and more profoundly venerated by each 
succeeding generation. 

John Hanson, the first President of the 
"United States of America in Congress As- 
sembled," that is, the first President under the 
Articles of Confederation, stood among the 
strongest of these nation-builders as a peer. 
It was his leadership that brought the last of 
the insurging colonies together under a com- 
mon bond; that united their fortunes and their 
fate forever, and that gave them their first 
perfected plan of centralized government. It 
was the leadership of John Hanson that di- 
vorced the colonies from the Northwest Ter- 
ritory and paved the way for the ultimate for- 
mation of the group of great States beyond 
the Allegheny Mountains. 

For all this Hanson was rewarded with the 
Presidency of the re-formed Continental Con- 
gress the day his second term in that body be- 
gan. By his election Hanson, already recog- 



Maryland in National Politics. 3 

nized as the first Marylander of his day, as- 
sumed the rank and prerogatives of the First 
Citizen of the Colonies. Washington the sol- 
dier, and Hanson the civilian, typified the 
spirit of this new nation. 

During three sessions Hanson presided over 
the deliberations of the Continental Congress. 
In that period he saw the American arms tri- 
umph over Great Britain. He saw the arri- 
val of the French allies and, with victory at 
Yorktown, the liberty for which he and his 
fellow-countrymen had warred for eight long 
years, established on this continent. He saw 
the treaty of peace signed and the rights of the 
colonies guaranteed. As a last official act be- 
fore his retirement in 1782, Hanson had the 
distinguished honor to receive General Wash- 
ington and to present him to the Congress then 
sitting in Philadelphia. Out of this Congress 
grew the Constitutional Convention, and out 
of it the federal government under which the 
American people have grown to national man- 
hood. 



Around John Hanson centered one of the 
bitterest parliamentary struggles of early 
American history. As the representative of 
the only State which had refused to join the 



4 Maryland in National Politics. 

Union at the outbreak of the Revolution, he 
and his fellow-Marylanders had it within 
their power to determine whether a republic 
of united States was to be formed as a result of 
the successful issue of the Revolutionary War, 
or whether there should rise up in America 
thirteen weak but independent Common- 
wealths. 

Maryland, under the leadership of Hanson 
and his compatriots, finally yielded to the pres- 
sure and joined hands with the other colonies, 
but they did not surrender unconditionally un- 
til they had won their fight against the design 
of the other colonies to hold forever the 
Northwest, or Crown Lands. This victory on 
Maryland's part not only changed the whole 
map of the United States, but it led directly 
to the formation of the federal union. Inci- 
dentally, it raised for the first time the ques- 
tion of States' rights, a question upon which 
the two great political parties have been 
founded, a question that brought on the Civil 
War, and a question that has survived until 
this day. 

It must not be suspected that Maryland's 
reluctance to cast its lot with the Confedera- 
tion was the result of any lukewarm feeling 
within the colony for independence. It is true 
that, under the old proprietary system of gov- 



Maryland in National Politics. 5 

ernment, a few of the leading factors opposed 
any step that would separate the colonists from 
Great Britain. For a brief time these Tories 
had controlled the Maryland delegates in the 
Continental Congress and had held out against 
a declaration for full independence. John 
Hanson, however, went to Annapolis in 1775 
at the head of the Frederick county delega- 
tion and, by a masterly campaign, overthrew 
the proprietary government, installing in its 
place a provincial convention. Gaining ascen- 
dency over this convention, Hanson put Mary- 
land forever on record when he wrote and had 
passed the following resolution: 

"Rasolved, That what may be recommended by a 
majority of Congress, equally delegated by the peo- 
ple of the United Colonies, we will at the hazard of 
our lives and fortunes support and maintain, and 
that every resolution of the convention tending to 
separate this province from a majority of the colon- 
ies, without the consent of the people, is destructive 
of our internal safety." 

This firm declaration placed Maryland 
squarely on the side of independence. A later 
motion in that convention recalled the former 
instructions to the Maryland delegates in Con- 
gress and empowered them to concur "in de- 
claring the United Colonies free and indepen- 
dent States," further cementing the Union. 
There was, however, a reservation in the ac- 



6 Maryland in National Politics. 

ceptance by Maryland of a part in the general 
government. This reservation involved a de- 
mand that the back country, then claimed in 
parcels by practically all the colonies, be ceded 
to the federation. And it was this demand 
v^hich probably changed the w^hole course of 
our national life. 

It is the story of this demand on the part of 
Maryland that marks the place in permanent 
history now occupied by John Hanson. The 
ratification of the Articles of Confederation 
by Maryland had been preceded in the Con- 
tinental Congress by a bitter struggle over the 
form of government for the colonies as a body! 
The Declaration of Independence had been 
adopted with patriotic enthusiasm at the out- 
break of the war and, in subscribing to this 
instrument, the Congress had dealt with the 
colonies as one nation. When, however, the 
formulation of the Articles of Confederation 
was under consideration. Congress found itself 
dealing with thirteen sovereign Common- 
wealths. Each of these States had its special 
interests to protect, and in the main these in- 
terests involved the distribution among them 
of the back country extending from the Alle- 
gheny Mountains to the Mississippi River. 

After a prolonged parliamentary battle, the 
Articles were ratified in 1778 by the delegates 



Maryland in National Politics. 7 

of all the States except New Jersey, Delaware 
and Maryland. Subsequently, New Jersey 
and Delaware signed them, leaving only 
Maryland to complete the Union. John Han- 
son and his colleague from Maryland, Daniel 
Carroll, stubbornly refused to subscribe to the 
Articles on the part of their State until the 
other colonies agreed to surrender their claims 
to the Northwest Territory and to dedicate 
that vast domain to the federal government. 

To such a demand the leading States having 
title to the large area in the Northwest, at first 
flatly refused to yield. They objected on the 
ground that they could not be parties to any 
form of federal government in which so much 
property and power might be concentrated. 
They were frankly jealous of their authority 
and identity as States, and were indisposed to 
make any sacrifice of land that might, in the 
future, obscure their individuality. In as- 
suming this position, therefore, the first direct 
issue of States' rights as opposed to a strong 
central government, was raised in the Conti- 
nental Congress. And upon that issue the 
American Union came dangerously near go- 
ing upon the rocks, just as upon the same issue 
seventy years later the Union was actually dis- 
rupted and only reformed at the cost of the 
bloodiest war of a century. 



8 Maryland in National Politics. 

Hanson and Carroll held out to the last 
against the claims set up by the States to the 
Crown Lands. They took the position that 
these lands had ill-defined boundaries; that 
they could not be successfully held by any of 
the eastern colonies, and that inasmuch as they 
had been gained from a common enemy by the 
effort of all, this domain should inure to the 
benefit of all alike. Such a position was main- 
tained with an obstinacy that threatened to 
wreck the whole plan of confederation. In 
the end the colonies compromised their claims, 
but prior to the compromise the Maryland 
legislature found it wise to authorize their 
delegates to ratify the Articles without further 
delay. In giving that authority, however, the 
reservation already referred to was renewed. 

The historical circumstance of this prema- 
ture action by the Maryland legislature is 
highly interesting. It had been the fixed de- 
termination of Maryland to hold out against 
even a conditional ratification of the Articles 
of Confederation until the back lands question 
was settled. Hanson urged this attitude, and 
his position would doubtless have been ad- 
hered to at home but for the receipt of confi- 
dential information by the Congress to the 
effect that France deplored any division 
among the colonies upon the question of a 



Maryland in National Politics. 9 

federal union. France was then allied with 
America in the war against Britain, and upon 
the good will of that nation depended in large 
measure the success of the Revolution. The 
view taken of Maryland's refusal to unite 
v>^ith the other colonies was communicated to 
Hanson, and by him transmitted to the legisla- 
ture late in January, 1781. 

This new situation created a profound sen- 
sation at Annapolis. It had never been the 
purpose of Maryland to withhold her sup- 
port from her sister colonies in the war for 
independence. That is clearly shown by the 
resolution passed by the Provincial Convention 
in 1775, already quoted. More than that, 
Maryland had sent her quota of troops to join 
the Continental Army. She had sent the first 
body of southern troops to New England, 
when the command of Frederick riflemen un- 
der Cresap and Price marched in 22 days all 
the way to Cambridge. She had sent How- 
ard, Smallwood, Williams and DeKalb to 
lead her soldiers. But Maryland had held 
out against the final ratification of the Articles 
in order to force the colonies to cede their 
claims to the back lands to the confederation. 
Finding, however, that their purpose was 
wholly misunderstood abroad, and particu- 
larly in France, and that the English were 



lo Maryland in National Politics. 

making capital of it in nearly all the courts of 
Europe, Maryland hastened to put at rest all 
doubts as to her allegiance by the passage of a 
resolution empowering her delegates in Con- 
gress to sign the Articles forthwith. Because 
of the historic bearing of this resolution, in 
that it signalized the completion of the Union, 
it is quoted in full, as follows: 

"Whereas, It has been said that the common 
enemy is encouraged by this State not acceding to. 
the Confederation, to hope that the union of the 
sister States may be dissolved ; and, therefore, prose- 
cutes the war in expectation of an event so dis- 
graceful to America; and our friends and illustrious 
ally are impressed with an idea that the common 
cause would be promoted by our formally acceding 
tothe Confederation; this General Assembly, conscious 
that this State hath, from the commencement of the 
war, strenuously exerted herself in the common 
cause, and fully satisfied that if no formal confeder- 
ation was to take place, it is the fixed determination 
of this State to continue her exertions to the utmost, 
agreeable to the faith pledged in the union ; from an 
earnest desire to conciliate the affection of the sister 
States; to convince all the world of our unalterable 
resolution to support the independence of the United 
States, and the alliance with his Most Christian 
Majesty, and to destroy forever any apprehension of 
our friends, or hope of our enemies of this State be- 
ing again united to Great Britain ; 

"Be it resolved by the General Assembly of Mary- 
land, That the delegates of this State in Congress, or 
any two or three of them, shall be, and are hereby, 
empowered and required on behalf of this State to 



Maryland in National Politics, iix^ 

subscribe to the Articles of Confederation and per- 
petual union between the States of New Hampshire, 
Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence 
Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North 
Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, signed by the 
General Congress of the said United States by the 
Honorable Henry Laurens, Esquire, their then Presi- 
dent, and laid before the Legislature of this State to 
be ratified if approved. And that the said Articles 
of Confederation and perpetual union as aforesaid 
subscribed, shall henceforth be ratified and become 
conclusive as to this State, and obligatory thereon. 
And it is hereby declared that, by acceding to the said 
Confederation, this State does not relinquish nor in- 
tend to relinquish any right or interest she hath with 
the other United or Confederated States to the back 
country ; but claims the same as fully as was done by 
the legislature of this State in their declaration, 
which stands entered on the journals of Congress; 
this State relying upon the justice of the several 
States, hereafter as to said claim made by this State. 

"And it is further declared that no article of said 
Confederation can or ought to bind this or any 
other State to guarantee any exclusive claim of any 
particular State to the soil of the said back lands, 
or any such claim of jurisdiction over the said lands 
or the inhabitants thereof. 

"By the House of Delegates, January 3, 1781, 
read and assented to. By order of the Senate, 
February 2, 1781. Read and assented to." 

This action on the part of the Maryland 
legislature was followed by the State's ratifi- 
cation of the Articles of Confederation, when 
on March i, John Hanson and Daniel Carroll 



12 Maryland in National Politics. 

affixed their signatures to the instrument be- 
fore the whole body of Congress. Wild ap- 
plause followed this act, applause that echoed 
throughout the whole world. France was so 
pleased at the final union of all the colonies 
that Count de Vergennes, the French Minister 
for Foreign Affairs, dispatched a letter to Con- 
gress on June 29 felicitating the colonies upon 
the accession of Maryland. This letter, quoted 
from the Journals of the Continental Congress, 
is, in part, as follows : 

"The accession of the State of Maryland to the 
General Confederation, in the opinion of the Court 
of France, presents very great advantages, among 
which is this, that Congress, having at last acquired 
that power which the Act of Confederation has as- 
signed to them, it is to be expected that their orders 
will be fully and exactly executed, and that they 
will take advantage of the resources of their coun- 
try to give to American patriotism new energy. The 
Minister is directed to inform Congress of the satis- 
faction the King has received on that account, and 
to tell them, at the same time, that there is the most 
pressing necessity to take more effectual measures 
than heretofore to drive the British out of the Conti- 
nent. The King entreats the United States, as his 
friends, not to lose a moment in acting as vigorous- 
ly as possible against the common enemy." 

While Maryland's ratification of the Ar- 
ticles at once dissipated all foreign complica- 
tions by placing the Federal Union upon a solid 
basis, this act did not end the bitter domestic 



Maryland in National Politics. 13 

controversy over the western domain. As in- 
dicated in the resolution of the legislature au- 
thorizing Hanson and Carroll to subscribe to 
the Articles, Maryland distinctly reserved this 
phase of the question for future consideration. 
In fact, Hanson, before he recommended rati- 
fication, had secured pledges from many of the 
members of Congress to the effect that the 
land issue would be settled to the satisfaction 
of his State, if not before, certainly soon after 
the Articles should be unanimously agreed to. 
Immediately after placing his signature to the 
Articles, Hanson renewed his fight for the 
dedication of the western territory to the gen- 
eral government. 

New York was the first to yield to Mary- 
land's demands, that State signifying her will- 
ingness to give up the claims before Maryland 
formally ratified the Articles. A short time 
afterward Congress agreed to recommend the 
same surrender to the other States. Virginia 
and Connecticut were the next to withdraw 
their claims, and before Hanson retired from 
Congress Massachusetts fell into line, aban- 
doning her interest in the Northwest. Hanson 
had won his fight. The Maryland idea tri- 
umphed and the area out of which Michigan, 
Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio were 
carved became the common property of the 



14 Maryland in National Politics. 

Federal Union, "subject to be parceled out by 
Congress into free, convenient and indepen- 
dent governments." 

Having forced the Maryland view upon 
Congress by his dogged persistence, Hanson at 
once took his place as one of the strong figures 
in that body. He had already rendered valu- 
able service to the Union in other ways. He 
had headed a committee early in 1781, to nego- 
tiate a treaty with the Cherokee and Chicasaw 
Indians; he had defeated the Dunmore ex- 
pedition; he had served on the committee for 
both the war and the navy, and had proved a 
useful member of the body. On November 
5, 1781, Congress proceeded to the election of 
a President, and the Marylander received the 
election. The following minute from the 
Journals of the Continental Congress records 
this act: 

"The credentials being read, Congress proceeded 
to the election of a President; and the ballots being 
taken, the Honorable John Hanson was elected." 

Hanson's first important official act as Pres- 
ident of the United States in Congress Assem- 
bled was to prepare and forward a letter to 
King Louis the Sixteenth, expressing the grat- 
itude of the American nation for the support 
given by France in the defeat of Cornwallis 
at Yorktown. This letter is the only state 



Maryland in National Politics. 15 

paper from the hand of the Marylander pre- 
served in the records of the Congress. It is 
as follows : 

"GREAT, FAITHFUL AND BELOVED 
FRIEND AND ALLY: 

"At a period so glorious to the arms of France, 
both by land and sea, and so favorable to the for- 
tunes of America, it is with peculiar satisfaction 
that we congratulate the Monarch whose wise coun- 
sel and generous support have so largely contrib- 
uted to events illustrious in themselves and promis- 
ing consequences truly important. 

"We wish to convey to Your Majesty our sense 
of the victory obtained by the Count de Grasse over 
the enemy's fleet on our coast, and the subsequent 
reduction of the British armament in Virginia; and 
we repeat our grateful acknowledgments for the 
various aids so seasonably extended to us. From 
the benevolence and magnanimity which have 
hitherto interested Your Majesty in the welfare of 
these States, we are convinced that you will on this 
occasion feel an equal pleasure with ourselves, whose 
immediate advantage is the result of such fortunate 
exertions. 

"We mention with very great pleasure the zeal 
and ability manifested by the Count de Rocham- 
beau, commanding Your Majesty's forces in the 
allied army. His conduct and that of the officers 
under him, merit our fullest approbation; and we 
are made further happy by the perfect harmony and 
affection which have subsisted between the troops 
of the two nations. 

"The distress occasioned to the common enemy 
by the combined operations will, we trust, point 
out to both nations the utiHty of similar measures 



1 6 Maryland in National Politics. 

in the future; and whilst it induces Your Majesty 
to supply that naval force which the situation of our 
country renders necessary, it will urge the United 
States to every effort which their particular interests, 
added to their desire of seconding Your Majesty's 
views, can call forth to insure the complete success 
of attacks upon the enemy's strongholds. 

"It is with great pleasure that the United States 
continue to number some of Your Majesty's sub- 
jects amongst their most able, spirited and faithful 
officers. It affords the world a striking proof of 
the intimate connection which subsists between the 
allied nations and at the same time serves to cement 
the union which it manifests. 

"Major General the Marquis de la Fayette has in 
this campaign so greatly added to the reputation he 
had before acquired, that we are desirous to obtain 
for him, on our behalf, every notice, in addition to 
that favorable reception which his merits cannot 
fail to meet with from a generous and enlightened 
sovereign; and in that view we have directed our 
Minister Plenipotentiary to present the Marquis to 
Your Majesty. 

"We pray God, great faithful and beloved friend 
and ally, always to keep Your Majesty in His holy 
protection. 

"Done at Philadelphia, the 29th day of November, 
in the year of our Lord 1781, and in the sixth year 
of our independence. By the United States in Con- 
gress Assembled. Your faithful friends and allies. 
John Hanson, President. 

At the end of his third term as a delegate 
from Maryland, Hanson retired to his native 
State. He was then 68 years of age and was 
worn out with public service. He declined 



Maryland in National Politics. 17 

various commissions from his State, prefer- 
ring to return to his home in Frederick county 
to spend in quiet the remaining days. He 
died November 22, 1783. One hundred and 
twenty years afterward his State honored his 
name, when it authorized the erection of a 
statue of him in Statuary Hall, at the national 
capitol in Washington. By Act of Congress 
each State is permitted to thus memorialize 
two of its sons, and Maryland, moved by the 
recollection of the service John Hanson ren- 
dered as a nation-builder, a pathfinder and 
pioneer in the founding of this government, 
voted to thus commemorate his service. 



1 8 Maryland in National Politics. 



CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLL- 
TON 

1737— 1832 

When the Congress of the United States in- 
vited the people of Maryland, a few years ago, 
to memorialize the public services of two of 
her renowned sons and to erect statues to their 
memory in the Capitol at Washington, the 
whole horizon was surveyed to find two men 
who had, on the one hand, contributed most 
to the nation's history and who were, on the 
other, representative of the State's best tradi 
tions. 

There were gallant soldiers, eminent jurists, 
profound lawyers, learned statesmen and ac- 
complished diplomats in the array of distin- 
guished men from which this ancient Com- 
monwealth had to choose. For, from the very 
genesis of the republic, Marylanders have 
played an important part in shaping its des- 
tiny. They have fought its wars. They have 
made its laws. They have sat upon its highest 
court, and they have determined its interna- 
tional relations. Their records presented a 
veritable wealth of achievement. 

And, had this honor fallen upon General 
Otho H. Williams or Colonel Tench Tilgh- 



Maryland in National Politics. 19 

man, or John Eager Howard, or Smallwood 
or DeKalb, martial heroes of the Revolution; 
or upon Samuel Chase or Francis Thomas, or 
Reverdy Johnson, or Arthur Pue Gorman — 
leading statesmen of their time; or upon Wil- 
liam Pinkney or Luther Martin, or Henry 
Winter Davis — far famed as lawyers and ora- 
tors; or upon Caecilius Calvert or Francis 
Scott Key, or Robert Eden or William Paca — 
if the honor of a place in Statuary Hall had 
been accorded to any of this long line, it would 
not have been unworthily bestowed. 

But these men, however splendid their ca- 
reers, were passed over. Maryland reserved 
this national memorial, this tribute of a grate- 
ful people, for Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 
signer of the Declaration of Independence, 
and for John Hanson, the first President of 
the United States in Congress Assembled. 
She reserved it for the two heroic spirits who 
had pledged her to the cause of freedom on 
this continent, to the men who had led her 
across the threshold of national life. It was 
the work, the courage, the devotion of Carroll 
and Hanson, and their compatriots of the Rev- 
olution, which "gave to the world the first true 
federal State." 

And today the bronze images of these two 
nation-founders stand side by side in the 



20 Maryland in National Politics. 

American Pantheon, flanked by the sculptured 
figures of the country's heroes. 

With the name of Charles Carroll of Car- 
rollton there is associated all the romance and 
patriotic sentiment of the earliest period of 
our national history. He stood foremost in 
the struggle of the colonies against British 
aggression. He battled tirelessly for the es- 
tablishment of order and constitutional gov- 
ernment, after the bonds were broken. He 
was the first Marylander to sit in the United 
States Senate when the new Congress con- 
vened. And, as the last survivor of the im- 
mortal signers of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, "the most illustrious company of men 
assembled upon the earth since the Apostles," 
he was for forty years the great American pa- 
triarch. His home became a national shrine 
and his name is yet venerated throughout the 
land as is that of no other man in all the annals 
of his State. 



The stirring events in the life of Charles 
Carroll, leading up to the formal declaration 
by the American colonies of their independ- 
ence, form a chapter in our history of intense 
dramatic interest. And yet this chapter tells 
only half the story of this Marylander's serv- 



Maryland in National Politics. 21 

ice to the people of his State and to the new 
republic which he helped to create. 

Long before the Declaration was signed 
Carroll had thrown his powerful influence 
among the colonists of Maryland, his fortune, 
his all, into balances for liberty. He had 
joined in denouncing the "Boston port bill." 
He had demanded that the brig "Peggy Stew- 
art," loaded with tea and lying in the harbor 
of Annapolis, be burned to the water's edge. 
He had counselled the Provincial Assembly to 
revoke the instructions to Maryland's dele- 
gates in the Continental Congress — instruc- 
tions which limited them to obtaining redress 
for grievances without breaking with the 
mother country. He had served on a secret 
mission to Canada, in the hope of uniting that 
dominion with the colonies. All this was be- 
fore Carroll went to Philadelphia to affix his 
signature to the historic instrument. 

No less important, however, to the cause of 
independence and free government were Car- 
roll's contributions of a later period. He 
served almost continuously on the Board of 
War while the Continental armies were yet in 
the field. He aided in frustrating the "Conway 
cabal," which had sought to depose General 
Washington in favor of General Gates. When 
peace came, he labored determinedly for the 



\ 



22 Maryland in National Politics. 

formation of a federal union and for the adop- 
tion of the organic law drafted by the Consti- 
tutional Convention. He accepted a seat in 
the first Congress as a Senator from his State. 
And, as a practical legislator, he fathered the 
famous Judiciary Act and the Assumption 
Bill, measures which went far toward but- 
tressing the infant government. 

Not all of Carroll's fame, therefore, nor all 
his service to his country may be summed up 
in the circumstance of his having signed the 
Declaration of Independence, or even the fur- 
ther circumstance of his having outlived every 
other signer and every other member of the 
Continental Congress. The heroic work that 
preceded the Declaration and the constructive 
program that followed it, have added immeas- 
urably to the debt which the American people 
owe this Marylander. 

Even before Charles Carroll returned from 
England, where he had been educated, the 
agitation for independence had begun. The 
most stupid King in English history was on 
the throne. He had resolved in his heart that 
the colonists in America should bear a greater 
portion of taxation burdens and, overruling' 
the counsels of the elder Pitt, the Stamp Tax 
Act had been passed by Parliament. The de- 
mand for representation in that body had been 



Maryland in National Politics. 23 

denied the colonies, and blunder had followed 
blunder, until the ties that bound the men of 
America to the old country were being 
strained to the breaking point. 

The young colonist while in London had 
heard of the great Burke; he had listened to 
the younger Pitt and to Fox espouse and ex- 
pound the American doctrine, and his pro- 
foundest sympathies were with the people at 
home. Just before he returned to Maryland, 
in 1764, he happened to be conferring with 
some members of Parliament in Temple Court 
when one of them said: "If you colonists re- 
volt we will send 6,000 veteran English sol- 
diers to your country, who will march from 
one end of it to the other, for there is nothing 
with which you could resist them." In a 
flash Carroll answered with this defiance: 

"So they may, but your soldiers will be masters 
of the spot only on which they encamp. They will 
find naught but enemies before and around them. 
If we are beaten in the plains, we will retreat to our 
mountains and defy them. Our resources will in- 
crease with our difficulties. Necessity will force us 
to exert, until, tired of combating in vain against 
a spirit which victory after victory can not subdue, 
your armies will evacuate our soil, and your country 
retire a great loser by the contest." 

As soon as he had reached his home this 
ardent young man plunged into the political 



24 Maryland in National Politics. 

arena. The country was aflame over the out- 
rages born of British ignorance and arrogance. 
He engaged Daniel Dulaney, the ablest law- 
yer in the colony, in a controversy famous in 
its day. At the royal Governor of Maryland, 
who had sought to levy a tax not sanctioned 
by the provincial legislature, he hurled this 
bold and revolutionary threat: "In a land of 
freedom this arbitrary exercise of prerogative 
must not and will not be endured." 

Although one of the wealthiest men in 
America, and, therefore, among those whose 
loss would be greatest if open rebellion fol- 
lowed, Carroll hesitated not a moment in his 
measures for relieving the colonies of the un- 
just burdens imposed by the Throne. He 
joined the Sons of Liberty and traveled from 
one end of Maryland to the other, urging re- 
sistance to British tyranny. Around him gath- 
ered a dangerously determined group of spir- 
its. By an odd circumstance, too, it was to 
this young fire-eater that Anthony Stewart, 
owner of the brig "Peggy Stewart," had to 
turn when threatened by the people of An- 
napolis because of their resentment over the 
cargo of tea. At once Carroll told Stewart 
that the ship and its freight must be burned, 
and burned in sight of the people whom the 
merchant had insulted. And the vessel, with 



Maryland in National Politics. 25 

all sails set, was fired, while the throngs 
on shore cheered. ''The flames consumed at 
Annapolis what the waves buried at Boston." 

Meantime the Revolution had come and the 
colonies were preparing to fight to the death. 
Carroll's boldness and resourcefulness had at- 
tracted attention from Massachusetts to Geor- 
gia, and when the Continental Congress in 
1776 decided to send a commission to Canada 
to treat with British subjects there in the hope 
of forming a union, the young Marylander 
was asked to become a member of that body. 
This was Carroll's first service in a national 
role. It was in this connection that on Feb- 
ruary 15, 1775, the Continental Congress 
adopted the following resolution: 

"That a committee of three on the reports of the 
committee of correspondence (two of whom shall be 
members of Congress) be appointed to proceed to 
Canada, there to pursue such instructions as shall 
be given them by Congress. The members chosen 
are Dr. Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Samuel Chase and 
Mr. Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Resolved that 
Mr. Carroll be requested to prevail on Mr. John 
Carroll to accompany the committee to Canada, to 
assist them in such matters as they may think use- 
ful." 

On March 20 of the same year Congress 
prepared instructions to its Canadian Com- 
missioners, authorizing them to open negotia- 



26 Maryland in National Politics. 

tions with Canada for a union of interests in 
the war against Great Britain. Following this, 
the draft of a commission was adopted which 
was to form the credentials of the special en- 
voys. This commission, which has been pre- 
served in the Journals of the Continental 
Congress, is as follows : 

"The delegates of the United Colonies to Benja- 
min Franklin, LL. D., member of the Royal Acad- 
emy of Sciences at Paris, F. R. S., etc., etc., one of 
the delegates of the colony of Pennsylvania; Samuel 
Chase, Esq., one of the delegates of the colony of 
Maryland, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, in the 
said colony of Maryland, Esq., greeting: Know ye 
that we, placing especial trust and confidence in your 
zeal, fidelity, abilities, and assiduity, do, by these 
presents, constitute and appoint you, or any two of 
you, commissioners for and on behalf of us, and all 
the people of the United Colonies, whom we repre- 
sent, to promote, or to form an union between the 
said colonies and the people of Canada, according to 
the instructions herewith delivered to you, and such 
as you may hereafter receive; and to execute all 
such matters and things as you are or shall be di- 
rected by your said instructions. And we do re- 
quire all officers and soldiers, and others, who may 
facilitate your negotiation, or promote the success 
thereof, to aid and assist you herein; and you are 
from time to time to transmit and report your pro- 
ceedings to Congress. This commission to continue 
in force until revoked by this or a future Congress." 

This was a highly important mission. It 
had been the design of Congress to unite all 



Maryland in National Politics. 27 

the British possessions on the continent in one 
movement for their common independence. 
If this plan had succeeded there would today 
be no British dominion in North America. 
But the negotiations failed. The defeat and 
the death of Montgomery, followed by a levy 
to feed our starving army and reverses of our 
forces in the north, turned the Canadians 
against us. Many of them were Catholics and, 
although Charles Carroll and the Rev. John 
Carroll, a priest, hoped to influence their co- 
religionists, they were met with distrust, and 
finally with open hostility. 

Hastening back from Canada, Carroll went 
immediately to Annapolis and took his seat 
in the Provincial Assembly. He found that in 
his absence the colony had definitely moved 
against an immediate break with England. 
The delegates from Maryland in Congress 
had been directed to withhold their vote for 
complete independence and were, therefore, 
at Philadelphia standing practically alone 
among the delegations against the decisive 
step that was to forever alienate the colonies 
from Great Britain, Carroll joined forces 
with John Hanson and Chase, declaring, in 
perhaps the greatest speech of his life, that 
then was the time to act and to act with the 
same patriotism and love of free country that 



28 Maryland in National Politics. 

had actuated the other colonies. This trium- 
virate swept the convention off its feet. The 
original instructions were revoked, and on 
July 2 Carroll himself was named as a dele- 
gate to Congress. 

A few days later Carroll and his associates, 
who had at last been authorized to cast the lot 
of their colony with the other Common- 
wealths, presented the following credentials to 
the Continental Congress: 

"In Convention, Annapolis, July 4, 1776. 

"Resolved, That the Honorable Matthew Tilgh- 
man, Esq., and Thomas Johnson, Jr., William Paca, 
Samuel Chase, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of 
Carrollton and Robert Alexander, Esqs., or a ma- 
jority of them, or any three or more of them, be 
deputies to represent this colony in Congress, in as 
full and ample a manner as the deputies of this 
colony might have done under any appointment here- 
tofore made, until the next Convention shall make 
further order therein. Extract from the minutes. 
G. Duvall, clerk." 

Before the new Maryland delegation, armed 
with this commission, could reach Philadel- 
phia, the greatest drama in human history 
had been enacted. Twelve of the thirteen 
colonies had issued the declaration of their 
freedom to the world through an instrument 
that has become sacred to every American and 
which has taken its place in the files of time as 



Maryland in National Politics. 29 

one of the sublime documents in the history of 
civilization. 

There had been, however, dissension and di- 
vision in the Congress before this first crisis 
in the Revolution was reached. This compre- 
hended a wider difference of opinion as to the 
vital move than was indicated by Maryland's 
unwillingness to cross the Rubicon. On June 
7, 1776, the delegates from Virginia had pro- 
posed that Congress at once declare the United 
Colonies free and independent States and ab- 
solved from all allegiance to Great Britain. 
This order went over until the following day, 
when the Congress resolved itself into a com- 
mittee of the whole and debated the momen- 
tous question for two whole days. Wilson, 
Livingston, Rutledge and Dickinson argued 
ably for delay, though they recognized the 
fact that the colonies would never again unite 
with England. And in presenting these argu- 
ments repeated references were made to the 
reluctance of Maryland to join in a declara- 
tion at that time. Thomas Jefferson, in his 
Memoirs, gives an account of the proceed- 
ings of the days preceding the signing. In this 
he outlines the contentions of those who wished 
to act then and there, and of those who pre- 
ferred to wait. This, in part, is as follows: 



30 Maryland in National Politics. 

"That the people of the middle colonies (Mary- 
land, Delaware, Pennsylvania, the Jerseys and New 
York) were not yet ripe for bidding adieu to British 
connection, but that they were fast ripening, and in 
a short time would join the general voice of America. 

"That the delegates from Delaware county having 
declared their constituents ready to join, there were 
only two colonies, Pennsylvania and Maryland, 
whose delegates were absolutely tied up, and that 
these had, by their instructions, only reserved a 
right of confirmation or rejecting the measure. 

"That the voice of the representatives is not al- 
ways consonant with the voice of the people, and 
that this is remarkably the case with these middle 
colonies. 

"That the effect of the resolution of May 15th has 
proved this, which, raising murmurs of some in the 
colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, called forth 
the opposing voice of the freer part of the people 
and proved them to be a majority even in these 
colonies. 

"It appearing in the course of these debates that 
the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsyl- 
vania, Maryland, Delaware and South Carolina were 
not yet matured for falling from the parental stem, 
but that they were fast advancing to that state, it 
was thought most prudent to wait a while for them 
and to postpone the final decision to July ist, but, 
that this might occasion as little delay as possible, 
a committee was appointed to prepare a Declaration 
of Independence. The committee were John 
Adams, Dr. FrankHn, Roger Sherman, Robert R. 
Livingston and myself." 

This committee, Jefiferson adds, desired him 
to draw the declaration. This he did, and sub- 
mitted it to his colleagues. Approved, it was 



Maryland in National Politics. 31 

reported to Congress on June 28, when it was 
read and ordered to lie on the table. On July 
I St the measure was taken from the table and 
debated in the committee of the whole. At 
the close of the day it was adopted by the 
votes of New Hampshire, Connecticut, Mas- 
sachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Mary- 
land, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. 
South Carolina and Pennsylvania opposed it. 
Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania sub- 
sequently subscribed to the Declaration, and 
on the 4th of July, 1776, it was signed by every 
member present, except Dickinson, of Penn- 
sylvania. 

The new delegation from Maryland did not 
reach Philadelphia in time to join with the 
other States in signing the Declaration, but 
on July 19 Carroll arrived at the temporary 
capital and voted upon the motion to engross 
this paper. On August 2 Carroll, Chase, Paca 
and Stone affixed their signatures, and it was 
during this ceremony that one of the historic 
incidents in the life of Carroll had its setting. 

When the hour arrived for the Marylanders 
to place their names to the Declaration, John 
Hancock, President of the Congress, turned to 
Carroll and asked if the new arrival would 
sign it. "Most willingly," rang out the voice of 
the Maryland delegate. He stepped forward, 



32 Maryland in National Politics. 

pen in hand, and wrote the words, "Charles 
Carroll." As he turned around the delegates 
began bantering each other as to whether, in 
case of the failure of the revolution, they 
would, for their act, hang singly or hang to- 
gether. The remark was then made to Car- 
roll: "You can escape his Majesty the King, 
should he at some future time require your 
presence, because there are so many Charles 
Carrolls." 

The young man's answer was quick and to 
the point. He reached again for the pen and 
added the words, "of Carrollton," that his 
identity might be more easily established if 
the time should ever come when he should be 
called upon to pay with his life for the part 
he was then playing in the cause of independ- 
ence. 

Of this circumstance, Chauncey Depew has 
said: 

"This is the only title of the Revolution. There 
may have been many men of distinction in different 
ages and countries whose proud boast was that they 
had and could transmit to their descendants their 
name as of the duchy, the earldom, or the barony 
which had been bestowed upon them by royal grant 
for distinguished servces or as favors of the crown. 
But here was a distinction not bestowed, nor granted, 
but assumed by the writer, not as a title of nobility, 
not as a claim, like the lands of Blenheim, to a great 
estate conveyed by a grateful country, but as the 



Maryland in National Politics. 33 

location and description by which the executioner 
could find him if the cause of liberty failed. The 
members of revolutionary conventions, as a rule, 
when the revolutions failed, have met with bloody 
deaths or been driven into exile." 

As soon as Carroll had qualified as a dele- 
gate to the Continental Congress he was elect- 
ed a member of the Board of War, the body 
created to prosecute the revolution, to supply 
the sinews and to unite, as far as practicable, 
all the armed forces of the United Colonies 
into a general military establishment. With 
him as members of the board were Adams, 
Sherman, Harrison, Wilson and Rutledge. 
And in his diary John Adams tells us that the 
Marylander was "an excellent member, whose 
education, manners and application to busi- 
ness and to study did honor to his fortune, the 
first in America." 

It was, too, in his capacity as a member of 
the board that Carroll threw all the weight 
of his influence against the success of the Con- 
way cabal then plotting the overthrow of Gen- 
eral Washington. This conspiracy for a time 
seriously threatened the organization of the 
Continental Army. The cabal had hoped to 
put General Gates in supreme command of 
the troops and, by humiliating Washington, 
force his retirement. The plotters failed 
ignominiously. For his service in this con- 



34 Maryland in National Politics. 

nection Carroll won the affectionate gratitude 
of General Washington, an affection that was 
made manifest many times in later years. 

Carroll remained a member of the Congress 
long enough to support the determined cam- 
paign of his colleague, John Hanson, for the 
dedication to the general government of the 
Northwest lands, to which claims had been 
made by a number of the colonies. He re- 
signed in 1778, before the Articles of Con- 
federation were finally adopted, returning to 
Annapolis, where he resumed his seat in the 
State Assembly. As a member of that body, 
he led the fight for the adoption by Maryland 
of the Federal Constitution of 1789. He had 
declined election to the Congress of the Con- 
federation because he foresaw the powerless- 
ness of that unstable body, but had thrown 
himself with enthusiasm into the fight for the 
ratification of the Constitution. 

In fact, the convention which drafted the 
Constitution had its inception in a conference 
between commissioners representing Virginia, 
Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania. 
Washington and Gates had gone to Annapolis 
shortly after the conclusion of the war to meet 
with Carroll, Stone and Samuel Hughes to 
open and extend the navigation of the Poto- 
mac River. Commissioners from Pennsyl- 



Maryland in National Politics. 35 

vania and Delaware had also been invited, be- 
cause of the proposal to build what is now the 
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. These 
men met in Annapolis in 1784, and later at 
Mount Vernon. The commissioners early 
foresaw the futility of States acting longer as 
individual units, and proposed a general con- 
vention to assemble in Annapolis in 1786. 
Madison, who attended this later meeting, 
says that it lead directly to the calling of the 
Federal Convention which framed the Con- 
stitution. 

Under this Constitution, Carroll was sent to 
the United States Senate as the first Senator 
from Maryland. His colleague in that body 
was John Henry. In 1789 they appeared in 
New York and executed their oaths of office 
in the old City Hall of that city. At the out- 
set Carroll aligned himself with Washington 
and Hamilton and became an uncompromis- 
ing Federalist. His authorship of the Judi- 
ciary Act and of the Assumption Bill in the 
FirstCongresswere the distinguishing features 
of his two-year term. He was re-elected to 
the Senate, but returned to Maryland shortly 
afterward to spend the remainder of his days 
building for the future of the new State. On 
July 4, 1822, he appeared for the last time at 
a public function, when he helped lay the cor- 



36 Maryland in National Politics. 

nerstone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 
the first trunk line to be promoted upon this 
continent. 

Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the last 
survivor of that group of patriots who had 
placed their signatures upon the Declaration 
of Independence. Forty-seven of them lived 
to see the freedom to which they had pledged 
their constituences recognized by Great 
Britain. In all, forty-three of the signers 
lived to see the Constitution which they made 
possible, and the organic act under which we 
live, ratified by thirteen sovereign States. 
Three of them lived for more than fifty years 
after the July day upon which they asserted 
their political deliverance. On the morning 
of July 4, 1862, just one-half a century after 
the Declaration was adopted by the Conti- 
nental Congress, three members of that body — 
Thomas Jeflferson, John Adams and Charles 
Carroll of Carrollton — were yet upon earth. 
On the evening of that day there remained 
but one, Carroll, who lived six years longer. 
Daniel Webster, in his incomparable oration 
upon the death of Adams and Jefferson, de- 
livered in the Senate, concluded it with the 
following tribute to the last of the signers: 

"Of the illustrious signers of the Declaration 
of Independence there now remains only one, Charles 



Maryland in National Politics. 37 

Carroll He seems an aged oak, standing alone on 
the plain, which time has spared a little longer after 
all its contemporaries have been leveled with the dust. 
Venerable object! We delight to gather around its 
trunk while it yet stands, and to dwell beneath its, 
shadow. Sole survivor of an assembly of as great 
men as the world has ever witnessed in a transaction 
one of the most important that history records, what 
thoughts, what interesting reflections must fill his 
elevated and devout soul! If he dwell upon the 
past, how touching its recollections; if he survey the 
present, how happy, how joyous, how full of fruition 
of that hope which his ardent patriotism indulged; 
if he glance at the future, how does the prospect of 
his country's advancement almost bewilder and 
weaken conception ! Fortunate, distinguished pa- 
triot ! Interesting relic of the past ! Let him know 
that, while we honor the dead, we do not forget the 
living; and that there is not a heart here which does 
not fervently pray that Heaven may keep him yet 
back from the society of his companions." M:^ ,, ^ 



^iWr^h^ 



38 Maryland in National Politics. 



JAMES Mchenry 

1753— 1816 

Three charters of transcending consequence 
stand out in the early history of the Republic 
as monuments to the constructive genius of our 
government's founders. The Declaration of 
Independence, the Articles of Confederation 
and the Constitution of the United States are 
the concrete expressions of that genius. 

And with each of these great instruments 
the name of a Marylander has been intimately 
and traditionally associated. There is an 
historic affinity between Charles Carroll of 
Carrollton and the Declaration; another be- 
tween John Hanson and the Articles, and yet 
another between James McHenry and the 
Constitution. 

Carroll was the most picturesque figure of 
this group; Hanson the most exalted, in his 
day, but neither of them rendered more sub- 
stantial service to future generations of Ameri- 
cans than did McHenry, as the head of the 
Maryland delegation in that convention which 
framed the Federal Constitution, a constitu- 
tion which Gladstone described as "the most 
wonderful work struck off at a given time by 
the brain and purpose of man." 



Maryland in National Politics. 39 

Though McHenry had followed Washing- 
ton and Lafayette into the Revolutionary 
Army, sharing their fortunes and enduring 
their hardships; though he served honorably, 
afterward, as a delegate in the Continental 
Congress, and though as Secretary of War he 
aided two Presidents in establishing a system 
of executive authority for the new nation, the 
crowning achievement of his long and distin- 
guished career was his part in giving to the 
people of the United States a fundamental 
law. 

Moreover, to complete the work he and his 
associates performed at the Philadelphia Con- 
vention, McHenry returned forthwith to the 
State whose commission he had held and, 
throwing the weight of his great influence into 
the scales, prevailed upon Maryland to ratify 
this organic act. Similar action by eight other 
Commonwealths made the Constitution efifec- 
tive and gave us our first permanent plan of 
federal government. 

The Declaration of Independence paved the 
way for the Articles of Confederation. The 
Articles served imperfectly their purpose in 
prosecuting the War of the Revolution. But 
it remained for the Constitution to cement 
forever the States into a homogeneous union of 
common interest and common aspirations. It 



40 Maryland in National Politics. 

may be true, as once observed, that this instru- 
ment "had to lean awkwardly on the Farewell 
Address of Washington, the unrivaled common 
sense of Chief Justice Marshall and the colos- 
sal intellect of Daniel Webster, until in the 
fullness of time the sword of Ulysses S. Grant 
gave it a fixed relation to the course of human 
events." Yet it has survived all national vicis- 
situdes, and today commands the reverence of 
all Americans. It is recognized by students 
of political institutions throughout the world 
as a priceless contribution to the cause of gov- 
ernment. To have had a voice in its creation 
was, indeed, an enviable privilege. 



The victory at Yorktown, which made pos- 
sible the treaty of peace between the colonies 
and Great Britain, while assuring America of 
its political independence, nevertheless left 
the country in a state of chaos. The original 
Continental Congress had been called when a 
common danger threatened and when the need 
of a common defence presented itself. To 
this extent the colonists from Massachusetts 
to Georgia united their forces and consented, 
by mutual understanding, to prosecute the war 
under the title of the "United Colonies of 
America." 



Maryland in National Politics. 41 

This Congress, however, had no inherent au- 
thority. It operated under no fixed grant of 
power. Its existence was based upon no other 
relationship than that tenatively agreed to for 
the specific purpose of carrying on war. 
Early in its career it boldly overruled all dis- 
senters and issued its Declaration of Independ- 
ence. This declaration was not even referred 
back to the colonies for formal acceptance. 
The very existence of war itself was token 
enough of its acceptance. 

Finding itself impotent in enforcing its meas- 
ures for raising an army, for the levy of taxes 
and for the furthering of the war, the Conti- 
nental Congress, as soon as independence had 
been proclaimed, turned its attention to the 
formation of a closer union between the thir- 
teen Commonwealths. Up to that time each 
State had regulated its domestic affairs, had 
decided what troops it would furnish the army 
and what contributions of money and supplies 
each would make. 

A further complication arose when, immedi- 
ately after the Declaration had been signed, 
the separate colonies, one after another, adopt- 
ed constitutions, elected governors and legis- 
latures and assumed the prerogatives of indi- 
vidual political units. This new status of the 
States in itself dissolved the "United Colo- 



42 Maryland in National Politics. 

nies," though the Congress representing them 
remained the same and continued to adminis- 
ter in ineffective fashion the affairs of such 
union as still existed. 

The agitation in Congress for a stronger 
central government resulted, in 1777, in the 
adoption of the Articles of Confederation. 
Committees had struggled for weeks to evolve 
a plan whereby all interests might at least be 
securely united pending the result of the war. 
The Articles were finally agreed upon as the 
nearest approach to a federal system then pos- 
sible and, as soon as formally adopted, were 
referred to the individual States for ratifica- 
tion. Immediately, conflict arose. The States, 
many of them, refused to yield their sover- 
eignty in any degree to the general govern- 
ment, as proposed. Others refused to cede 
their "Crown Lands," that is, their share of 
the Northwest Territory, to the Confedera- 
tion. Maryland refused to ratify the Articles 
until these lands were so dedicated. 

After a bitter struggle, however, resulting 
in compromises and mutual concessions, the 
Articles were ratified by all the States, and on 
March i, 1781, became effective. Under this 
form of government the war was carried to a 
successful conclusion. Levies of men, money 
and supplies were granted by the States. The 



Maryland in National Politics. 43 

authority of Congress was generally respected 
and, though the Articles were manifestly in- 
adequate as a permanent institution, they made 
it possible for the States to concentrate their 
resources to the best advantage while the war 
lasted. 

No sooner had peace come than the im- 
perfections and impotency of the Confed- 
eration became apparent. The system es- 
tablished to meet an emergency could not en- 
dure, once the emergency was past. The Con- 
gress properly assumed the right to accept 
terms of peace with Great Britain, but it had 
no authority to solve the domestic problems 
that came in the wake of peace. That stronger 
measures were needed to prevent disintegra- 
tion was granted on every hand. 

This is the state of affairs that James McHen- 
ry and his comrades of the RevoltionaryArmy 
faced when they removed their ragged uni- 
forms and returned again to peaceful pursuits. 
They foresaw the futility of all their heroism 
and hardships unless some permanent form of 
government could be devised that would weld 
all the States together into an indissoluble 
union. Otherwise, thirteen weak and helpless 
Commonwealths would spring up on this con- 
tinent, upon which the greed of Europe might 
prey at will. 



44 Maryland in National Politics. 

McHenry had served gallantly in the Conti- 
nental army. He rushed to arms early in the 
war and, enlisting as a surgeon, he participated 
in the Battle of Long Island. He was cap- 
tured by the British General Howe, but was 
later exchanged, and almost immediately 
joined the stafif of General Washington. He 
is referred to in many histories as a member of 
Washington's "military family" and was, in 
fact, the General's secretary. It was during 
this period that McHenry and Colonel Alex- 
ander Hamilton, also attached to the stafif of 
the Commander-in-chief, figured in the de- 
nouement of General Arnold, the traitor. 
Henry Cabot Lodge describes this incident in 
his "Life of Washington." General Washing- 
ton, as will be recalled, had gone to Hartford 
to meet the French General Rochambeau. On 
his return he planned to stop at West Point to 
pay a call upon General Arnold. Lodge then 
says: 

"He was accompanied by his own staff and by 
Knox and LaFayette, with their officers. * * * 
The company was pleasant and lively, the morning 
was fair, and as they approached Arnold's head- 
quarters at the Robinson House, Washington turned 
off to the redoubts, telling the young men that as 
they were all in love with Mrs. Arnold, they would 
do well to go straight on and breakfast with her. 
Hamilton and McHenry followed his advice, and 
while they were at breakfast a note was brought to 



Maryland in National Politics. 45 

Arnold. It was a letter of warning from Andre, 
announcing his capture, which Colonel Jameson had 
forwarded and who ought to have been cashiered for 
doing it. Arnold at once left the table, and, saying 
that he was going to West Point, jumped into his 
boat and was rowed rapidly down the river to the 
British man-of-war. Washington, on his arrival, 
was told that Arnold had gone to the fort, and after 
a hasty breakfast he went over there himself. On 
reaching West Point no salute broke the stillness and 
no guard turned out to meet him. He was aston- 
ished to learn that his arrival was unexpected and 
that Arnold had not been there for two days." 

Later still, McHenry became an aide-de- 
camp to General Lafayette, having meanwhile 
been given a major's commission. His last 
military service was with the Fifth Pennsyl- 
vania Battalion. The war over, Major Mc- 
Henry returned to Baltimore and was almost 
immediately hurried to Philadelphia as a del- 
egate to the Continental Congress. He took 
his seat in that body in 1783 and remained a 
member until 1786. 

It was about this time that McHenry be- 
came deeply impressed with the failure of the 
Confederation to meet the needs of the hour. 
Respect for the temporary Union could not be 
longer enforced. Its measures were accepted 
as law if it happened to please all parties to 
so accept them. If not, they were openly 
flouted and derided. It was not a matter of 



46 Maryland in National Politics. 

rebellion or secession, but merely a general 
feeling that the plan of Confederation was a 
failure. McHenry shared in this view, and 
during the recesses of Congress he talked the 
facts over frankly with Martin, Hanson, Car- 
roll, Chase and other leading Marylanders. 

Meanwhile conflicts were arising between 
the States over their respective interests. This 
was particularly true of Maryland and Vir- 
ginia. Congress, under the Confederation, 
had no power to step in and compose these 
differences. The only means of providing 
remedies was through conferences. Accord- 
ingly, the legislatures of Maryland and Vir- 
ginia appointed commissioners in 1785 to form 
a compact for the regulation of navigation on 
the Potomac and Pocomoke Rivers and the 
Chesapeake Bay. These commissioners met 
first in Annapolis and then at Mount Vernon, 
but, finding that their powers were inade- 
quate, they adjourned after preparing recom- 
mendations to their respective legislatures. 
Among other things, these recommendations 
dwelt to considerable extent upon the neces- 
sity of a tarifif upon imports. 

The Virginia legislature, taking the initia- 
tive in this matter, passed resolutions calling 
upon all the States to send commissioners to a 
convention in Annapolis "to take into consid- 



Maryland in National Politics. 47 

eration the trade of the United States; to ex- 
amine the relative situation and trade of the 
States; to consider how far a uniform system 
in their commercial relations might be neces- 
sary to their common interests and their per- 
manent harmony and to report to the several 
States such an act relative to this great object 
as, when unanimously ratified by them, will 
enable the United States in Congress Assem- 
bled to provide the same," 

The Annapolis Convention assembled in 
1786, but only five States, viz.. New York, 
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and 
Virginia, sent delegates. No action was taken 
at this meeting beyond the preparation of a 
resolution to be presented to all the States and 
to Congress, calling upon the States to appoint 
commissioners ''to meet at Philadelphia on the 
second Monday in May next, to take into con- 
sideration the situation of the United States; 
to devise such further provisions as shall ap- 
pear to them necessary to render the Consti- 
tution of the Federal Government adequate to 
the exigencies of the Union, and to report such 
an act for the purpose to the United States in 
Congress Assembled, as, when agreed upon by 
them, and afterward confirmed by the legisla- 
ture of every State, will effectively provide 
the same." 



48 Maryland in National Politics. 

Virginia was again the first to move, and 
appointed delegates at once to meet commis- 
sioners for other States under the terms of this 
resolution. Congress received the report of 
the Annapolis Convention, but did not give it 
consideration until New York followed Vir- 
ginia's lead by directing its delegation in Con- 
gress to submit a resolution providing for a 
Constitutional Convention. Early in 1787 
Congress yielded to the pressure and passed 
the New York resolution, authorizing the as- 
sembling of a convention "for the purpose of 
revising the Articles of Confederation, and 
reporting to Congress and the several legisla- 
tures such alterations and provisions therein 
as shall, when agreed to in Congress and con- 
firmed by the States, render the Federal Con- 
stitution adequate to the exigencies of govern- 
ment and the preservation of the Union." 

Maryland had held aloof from the Annapo- 
lis Convention because McHenry and other 
leading men of the time did not believe it 
would prove of value in meeting the disorgan- 
ized condition in which the various States 
had found themselves. These strong men con- 
ceived it to be the duty of the States to draw 
a fundamental act that would effectively bind 
all the States together and which would, there- 
fore, measurably supersede rather than sup- 



Maryland in National Politics. 49 

plement the discredited Articles of Confed- 
eration. They therefore joined with enthusi- 
asm in the plan for a Constitutional Conven- 
tion. 

Meanwhile McHenry had given up his seat 
in the Continental Congress, then officially 
known as the "United States of America in 
Congress Assembled." He had gone here to 
consult with his friends as to the gravity of 
the situation, and was tremendously relieved 
when he found that Congress had given in and 
had consented to a constitutional convention. 
He ably counselled the State legislature to 
send deputies to this convention, and when 
on May 26 the legislature moved in this direc- 
tion it, by common consent, placed the name 
of James McHenry at the head of the list of 
delegates. The act of the legislature taking 
this momentous step has been preserved in the 
"Documentary History of the Constitution," 
compiled by the Department of State at Wash- 
ington. This act is as follows: 

"Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Mary- 
land, That the Honorable James McHenry, Daniel 
of Saint Thomas Jenifer, Daniel Carroll, James 
Francis Mercer and Luther Martin, Esquires, be ap- 
pointed and authorized on behalf of this State, to 
meet such deputies as may be appointed and au- 
thorized by any other of the United States to assem- 
ble in convention at Philadelphia for the purpose of 



50 Maryland in National Politics. 

revising the Federal system, and to join with them 
in considering such alterations and further pro- 
visions as may be necessary to render the Federal 
Constitution adequate to the exigencies of the Union 
and in reporting such an act for that purpose to the 
United States in Congress Assembled as, when 
agreed to by them, and duly confirmed by the several 
States, will effectually provide for the same, and the 
said deputies or such of them as shall attend the said 
convention shall have full power to represent this 
State, for the purpose aforesaid, and the said depu- 
ties are hereby directed to report the proceedings of 
said convention and any act agreed to therein to the 
next session of the General Assembly of this State." 

The two ablest men in this delegation were 
McHenry and Martin. McHenry was not as 
profound a lawyer as was his colleague, but 
he had had wide experience in colonial affairs, 
in the army, and latterly in the Continental 
Congress. Moreover, he had as great a per- 
sonal following in Maryland as any man in 
his day, and any constitution to which he 
might subscribe was guaranteed the support 
at home of a multitude of men whom no other 
leader in the State could influence. He hur- 
ried to Philadelphia shortly after the act of 
the legislature was passed. He took his seat 
in the convention on May 28, according to 
Madison's minutes, the same day as Oliver 
Ellsworth, Caleb Strong and Nathaniel Gor- 
ham, of Connecticut; Benjamin Franklin, 
Thomas Mifflin and Jared Ingersoll, of Penn- 



Maryland in National Politics. 51 

sylvania, and Gunning Bedford, of Delaware. 
The convention had assembled for business 
on the second Monday in May and organized 
by the election of General George Washington 
President. Twelve States were represented. 
Rhode Island alone refused to send deputies. 
For four months this body deliberated upon a 
permanent Constitution. Its debates were pro- 
found. Its divisions were sharp. Again and 
again differences arose that threatened to 
wreck the whole fabric. Only the patriotic 
determination of the delegates, a determina- 
tion to establish in America a strong central 
government, kept them time and again from 
abandoning their purpose. 

Finally, after a series of compromises, a 
draft of the Constitution was agreed upon. 
The larger States conceded to the smaller 
equal representation in the Senate. The 
smaller conceded to the larger representation 
in the House upon a basis of population. The 
North granted the South the right to import 
slaves, and the South granted the demand of 
the North that an impost tax upon everything 
but slaves might be levied. The States' rights 
advocates yielded much, and the strong Feder- 
alists yielded much. From first to last the 
Constituion represents a spirit of accommoda- 
tion and mutual concessions. It is the handi- 



52 Maryland in National Politics. 

work of no delegate, or delegation or sectional 
interest. It is the work of all delegations and 
all sections. 

Throughout the stormy period of travail, of 
apparently irreconcilable differences and of 
bitter argument marking this convention, Mc- 
Henry and Martin stood out. They served on 
important committees. They engaged day by 
day in the heated debate and fathered proposal 
after proposal. McHenry's was the mind that 
developed many of the issues raised by the 
Maryland delegation. Martin's was the voice 
that presented and defended them. Together 
they urged preservation of the rights of the 
States; together they opposed any restriction 
upon the importation of slaves; together they 
stood against the unrestrained power of Con- 
gress to pass navigation laws, and together 
they proposed the assumption of State debts 
by the federal government. 

When on September 17, however, the Con- 
stitution was finally voted upon, the Maryland 
delegation gave it almost unanimous indorse- 
ment. To do this they had to recede on many 
issues, but they felt that the welfare of the 
whole country would be better safeguarded 
by the instrument, as adopted, than by any other 
that could possibly command the support of 
the convention. All the Maryland deputies 



Maryland in National Politics. 53 

except Martin, therefore, cheerfully joined in 
in an address to Congress urging the ratifica- 
tion of the act. The following is an interest- 
ing extract from this address: 

"It is obviously impracticable in the federal gov- 
ernment of these States, to secure the rights of in- 
dependent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for 
the interest and safety of all. Individuals enter- 
ing society must give up a share of liberty to pre- 
serve the rest. The magnitude of the sacrifice must 
depend as well on situation and circumstance as on 
the object to be obtained. It is at all times difficult 
to draw with precision the line between those rights 
that must be surrendered and those which may be 
reserved; and on the present occasion this difficulty 
was increased by a difference among the several 
States as to their situation, extent, habits and partic- 
ular interests. In all our deliberations we kept 
steadily in view that which appears to us the great- 
est interest of every true American — the consolida- 
tion of our Union, in which is involved our pros- 
perity, felicity, safety and perhaps our national ex- 
istence. This important consideration, seriously and 
deeply impressed upon our minds, led each State in 
the convention to be less rigid on points of inferioi* 
magnitude than might have been otherwise expected. 
And thus the Constitution which we now present is 
the result of the spirit of amity, and of that mutual 
deference and concession, which the peculiarity of 
our political situation rendered indispensable." 

McHenry returned immediately to Annap- 
olis and took up the fight for the ratification 
by his State of the new Constitution. On the 
first of April, 1788, the day fixed by the Gen- 



54 Maryland in National Politics. 

eral Assembly for the State convention, that 
body assembled. Not until April 22, how- 
ever, did the convention proceed to a vote. 
And in the minutes of that day there appeared 
this line: "Mr. James McHenry, a delegate, 
returned from Baltimore Town, appeared and 
took his seat in the Convention." Led by this 
Baltimorean and by Jenifer and Mercer, the 
convention overwhelmingly moved to ratify 
the Constitution. It had been adopted pre- 
viously by Delaware, Pennsylvania, New 
Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut and Massachu- 
setts, in the order named. After Maryland, 
came South Carolina, New Hampshire, Vir- 
ginia, New York, North Carolina and Rhode 
Island. The vote of New Hampshire, the 
ninth State, put the act into operation. 

At this period in his career James McHenry 
wished to retire to private life. He felt that 
his work had been accomplished; that he had 
given his share of time and devotion to the 
public service and that he should be permitted 
to return to his family and take up again his 
private interests. And for ten years this de- 
sire was gratified. 

When, however, Henry Knox, who had 
been Washington's first Secretary of War, 
resigned, near the close of the second adminis- 
tration, to be succeeded for a few months by 



Maryland in National Politics. 55 

Timothy Pickering, the President sent for 
McHenry. Washington and McHenry had 
been devoted personal friends and comrades 
through the Revolutionary War. They had 
served together in the Constitutional Conven- 
tion and had been repeatedly in each other's 
company following the ratification of the Con- 
stitution. When, therefore, the first President 
needed a nev^ Secretary of War to relieve 
Pickering, he turned naturally to the Mary- 
lander. On January 29, 1796, McHenry as- 
sumed the oath of office and again entered 
Washington's official family. When Adams 
became President he urged McHenry to re- 
main in the Cabinet. 

The close of McHenry's official career was 
unhappy. President Adams, who had been 
from the beginning ambitious to succeed him- 
self, had become distrustful of more than one 
member of his Cabinet. He suspected Mc- 
Henry and Pickering of intriguing with 
Hamilton against the administration of which 
they were a part. Early in May, 1800, Adams 
began "house cleaning" by demanding Mc- 
Henry's resignation. This was followed with 
a similar demand for that of Pickering. Of 
this incident one writer has said that ''Adams 
stormed violently at McHenry upon asking 
his removal, as though irritated over some 



56 Maryland in National Politics. 

revelation concerning which Adams was ex- 
tremely sensitive. But McHenry had ami- 
able qualities, and the President regretted 
afterwards having displayed so much rudeness 
in removing him." All this the Marylander 
bore with calm dignity and, after bidding 
adieu to his Cabinet associates, he quietly 
withdrew, surrendering his porfolio on June 
I, 1800. 

For years after Washington returned to the 
shades of private life McHenry remained his 
confidante and friend. Shortly after the first 
President reached Mount Vernon, for in- 
stance, we find him writing the following to 
his old aide and adviser: 

"I find myself in the situation nearly of a begin- 
ner; for, although I have not houses to build (ex- 
cept one, which I must erect for the accommodation 
and security of my military, civil and private papers, 
which are voluminous and may be interesting), yet 
I have scarcely anything else about me that does not 
require considerable repairs. In a word, I am al- 
ready surrounded by joiners, masons and painters; 
and such is my anxiety to get out of their hands that 
I have scarcely a room to put a friend into or to sit 
myself without the music of hammers or the odorif- 
erous scent of paint." 

Again, a little later, he wrote to McHenry: 

"You are at the source of information and can 
find many things to relate, while I have nothing tg 
say that would either inform or amuse a Secretary 
of War at Philadelphia." 



Maryland in National Politics. 57 

Yet again this was penned to the Mary- 
lander: 

*'As no mode is yet adopted by President Adams 
by which the battalion officers are to be appointed, 
and as I think I stand on very precarious ground in 
my relation to him, I am not overzealous in taking 
unauthorized steps when those that I thought were 
authorized are not likely to meet with much respect." 

James McHenry, stout-hearted patriot, 
brave soldier and able lawmaker, lived until 
1 81 6. He lived to see his country engaged 
again in war with Great Britain. He lived to 
see another English army invade his country, 
burn its capital and threaten his own city with 
destruction. Happily, however, he lived to 
see the frowning old fortress in Baltimore har- 
bor, a fort that bore his name then and bears 
it today, belch forth the shot and shell that 
turned the invaders back and rid Maryland's 
shores forever of the "tyrant's heel." 



58 Maryland in National Politics. 

LUTHER MARTIN 

1748 — 1826 

From the very beginning of our life as a na- 
tion, Maryland has enjoyed rare distinction 
as a producer of great lawyers and profound 
jurists, a distinction worthily gained in the 
first half of the last century and just as worth- 
ily maintained ever since. 

Other States may have given to the republic 
a longer line of diplomatists, of statesmen and 
of executives, eminent or even pre-eminent in 
their day. As a matter of fact, many have. 
Yet none can lay claim to a bar outranking that 
of Maryland in brains, in ability and in learn- 
ing, particularly from the time of the conven- 
tion that framed the Federal Constitution un- 
til the beginning of the Civil War. 

During those six decades there lived and 
flourished a celebrated group of Maryland 
lawyers, a group now recognized far and 
wide as powerful factors in the history of that 
eventful period. For instance, Robert H. 
Harrison, Thomas Johnson, Samuel Chase, 
Gabriel Duvall and Roger B. Taney, mem- 
bers of the Maryland bar, sat upon the Su- 
preme Court of the United States; Robert 



Maryland in National Politics. 59 

Smith, William Pinkney, William Wirt, 
Roger B. Taney, John Nelson, and Reverdy 
Johnson were Attorney-Generals in as many 
Cabinets, while Philip Barton Key, John 
Thompson Mason, Charles Lee, William H. 
Winder, Robert Goodloe Harper, Jonathan 
Meredith, John Johnson, Arthur Scharf, 
James Winchester and a host of others were 
brilliant stars in the State's legal firmament. 

In Luther Martin, however, Maryland pre- 
sented to the country a figure as picturesque 
and a lawyer as accomplished as any who ever 
practiced before an American court. He 
was not as cultured as Wirt or Pinkney, nor as 
balanced as Chase or Taney, nor even as pol- 
ished as Reverdy Johnson, yet he had a mind 
as finely trained and a grasp of the law as 
sweeping as had any practitioner at the bar of 
his State, whether before him or after him. 

And it was as a lavs^er and nothing else that 
Luther Martin achieved towering fame. He 
held a few political offices, it is true, but all 
of them were in line with his profession. For 
twenty-nine years he was Attorney-General of 
his State, and for a very brief period he was 
Chief Justice of the Court of Oyer and Ter- 
miner. Add to that a brief service in the 
Continental Congress, and another brief serv- 
ice as a Maryland delegate in the Constitu- 



6o Maryland in National Politics. 

tional Convention, and the whole story of 
Martin's career as a public official is told. 

He left no record of note in the Continental 
Congress, but his course in the Constitutional 
Convention gave him a station among the 
strongest men in that body. His determined 
championship of the States' rights cause, end- 
ing in the utter defeat, under his leadership, 
of the Virginia or Randolph plan for the fed- 
eral union, introduced him as a national 
character and gave him identity from end to 
end of the country. 

Martin's chief place in American history, 
however, rests upon his appearance in two of 
the most dramatic legal battles ever waged 
upon this continent. He was chief counsel for 
the respondent in the impeachment of Samuel 
Chase, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court 
of the United States, and was the ablest de- 
fender of Aaron Burr when the former Vice- 
President was arraigned at Richmond, Va., 
on the charge of high treason. And in each of 
these cases this Marylander triumphed, 
though opposed by an array of legal talent as 
formidable as was ever assembled before a 
court of justice in this or any other country. 



Luther Martin's early life was as humble 
and unpromising as was that of any American 



Maryland in National Politics. 6i 

youth ever sent forth from the parental roof 
without patrimony, without influential friends 
and without prospects. He was born in 
Brunswick, N. J., in 1744, was graduated 
from Princeton College in 1766, and was then 
ushered out into the world to make of himself 
whatever he might. He taught school for a 
while in Queenstown, Md., studied law, and 
was admitted to the bar at Williamsburg, Va., 
in 1 77 1. Thereafter he returned to the East- 
ern Shore of Maryland, and his successes in 
court were so pronounced that in 1778 he was 
appointed Attorney-General of the State. A 
few years later he was temporarily relieved of 
his duties that he might participate in the for- 
mation of a perpetual union of all the States. 
Martin had already attended two sessions of 
the Continental Congress, then operating un- 
der the Articles of Confederation, and had be- 
come fixed in his conviction that the unstable 
form of government then in effect must be 
supplanted by a stronger union, else the whole 
confederacy would collapse. But as a member 
of the Constitutional Convention he stood like 
a Gibraltar against any scheme of federalism 
that tended to swallow up the smaller States 
or that would in any degree deprive any of 
them of their sovereignty. His superb fight 
against the Virginian proposal, a proposal 



62 Maryland in National Politics. 

which he conceived to be in direct opposition 
to the rights of the States, is most interestingly 
told by Judge Ashley M. Gould in his 
"Sketch of Luther Martin." In this Judge 
Gould says : 

"In the Constitutional Convention, Martin be- 
longed pre-eminently to the class of excellent critics, 
and from the ninth day of June, when he presented 
his credentials, up to the day when he went back to 
Maryland vowing that he would have nothing more 
to do with such high-handed proceedings, his posi- 
tion was one of able and aggresive opposition to any 
scheme which had for its object the establishment of 
a highly centralized and puissant national govern- 
ment. He was the representative of one of the 
smaller States, and with quick precision saw the bale- 
ful results to those States which would follow the 
adoption of what history knows as the Virginia 
plan, introduced by Edmond Randolph, the Gov- 
ernor of the State. It will hardly be contended, at 
this time, by the most ardent advocate of a central- 
ized and powerful national government, that the 
Virginia plan, with its practical elimination of the 
smaller States from the exercise of federal power, 
its provision for setting aside by the national legis- 
lature of such State laws as it might deem uncon- 
stitutional, and its executive to be chosen by the 
same national legislature, would have stood the test 
of time; indeed, that it would have endured longer 
than that "rope of sand," the Confederation. And, 
yet one who studies even the brief and practically 
surreptitious journals of that convention must con- 
clude that the present Constitution would never have 
been evolved from its labors, had it not been for the 
leadership of Luther Martin, aided by Yates and 



Maryland in National Politics. 63 

Lansing, of New York, in opposition to the scheme 
of Edmond Randolph, backed, as it was, by the 
Father of the Country himself." 

It was this victory, monumental in its conse- 
quences, that marked Luther Martin as a 
fighter of the highest order. Moreover, it 
brought home to all Marylanders the fact that 
they had among them a leader in whom they 
might safely entrust their fortunes as a State. 
No political office in the gift of the Common- 
wealth was beyond Martin at that time, yet 
there was not one that tempted him for one 
fleeting moment. Every ambition for glory, 
every aspiration for power within his breast 
centered about his profession, and that alone. 
He resumed his duties as Attorney-General, 
engaging all the while in a wide and lucrative 
private practice. Nothing then or thereafter 
could lure him away from the law. 

While in the Continental Congress, Luther 
Martin had as a colleague from Maryland 
Samuel Chase, one of the foremost lawyers of 
his time. When the Maryland convention was 
called to ratify the Constitution, Martin and 
Chase were again associated, first as delegates, 
then as opponents to that ratification. Seven 
years afterward these two men were the lead- 
ing figures, one as the accused and the other 
as his counsel, in the greatest of the early im- 



64 Maryland in National Politics. 

peachment proceedings under the Constitution 
of the United States. 

Chase had, in the meantime, been appointed 
an Associate Justice of the Federal Supreme 
Court by President Washington. He had in 
earlier days been a bitter anti-Federalist, and 
as such had joined with Martin in condemn- 
ing the Constitution. As a judge, however, 
Chase was now under popular indictment as 
an uncompromising Federalist, and as a 
stanch believer in the jurisdiction of the 
judiciary over the legislative and executive 
departments of the federal government. Sup- 
porting this indictment was the administration 
of Thomas Jefferson, led by the President 
himself. 

This strong current of hostility to Judge 
Chase, intensified by the Federalist leaning of 
the whole Supreme Court, resulted in 1805 
in a motion in the House of Representatives 
for the impeachment of the Marylander. 
The specific grievance was a charge delivered 
by the Associate Justice to a grand jury in 
Baltimore, in which he bitterly arraigned the 
administration of Jefferson. 

No sooner had the House adopted the im- 
peachment resolution than Luther Martin 
volunteered his services to his old friend, 
Chase. Martin had twenty years before re- 



Maryland in National Politics. 65 

ceived his appointment as Attorney-General 
at the hands of Chase. He had tried thou- 
sands of cases before the Justice when the lat- 
ter sat on the Maryland beijch, and had been 
associated politically with the accused from 
the beginning of his career. Moreover, Mar- 
tin was an inveterate hater of Jefiferson, just 
as Jefferson was the implacable foe of Chase. 
Therefore, the Maryland lawyer entered the 
impeachment case with the keenest enthusi- 
asm. 

The trial of the Associate Justice took place 
in the old Senate Chamber, the Senators as- 
suming the oath as jurors, and Vice-President 
Aaron Burr sitting as the presiding judge. 
The entire membership of the House of Rep- 
resentatives attended in a body and were 
flanked by members of the Cabinet and by the 
Diplomatic Corps. The chief manager of the 
impeachment on the part of the House was 
John Randolph of Roanoke, and though but 
thirty-one years of age, he was the acknowl- 
edged leader of that body. Opposite Randolph 
sat Luther Martin, chief counsel for the ac- 
cused, whom Professor Adams, in his "Life of 
Randolph," described as the "most formidable 
of American advocates, the rollicking, witty, 
audacious Attorney-General of Maryland, 
boon companion of Chase and the whole bar; 



66 Maryland in National Politics. 

drunken, generous, slovenly, grand; bulldog 
of Federalism, as Mr. Jefferson called him; 
shouting with schoolboy's fun at the idea of 
tearing Randolph's indictment to pieces and 
teaching the Virginia Democrats some law." 
As the famous trial closed, Luther Martin 
delivered his argument to the Senate, an argu- 
ment that acquitted Chase and invited the en- 
thusiastic plaudits of the whole country. This 
speech occupied almost two days in delivery, 
and was perhaps the crowning effort of Mar- 
tin's career. Of it Professor Adams says: 

"If any student of American history, curious to 
test the relative value of reputations, will read Ran- 
dolph's opening address, and then pass on to the 
argument of Luther Martin, he will feel the distance 
between show and strength, between intellectual 
brightness and intellectual power. Nothing can be 
finer in its way than Martin's famous speech. Its 
rugged and sustained force; its strong humor, au- 
dacity and dexterity ; its even flow and simple choice 
of language, free from rhetoric and affectations; its 
close and compulsive grip of the law; its good-na- 
tured contempt for the obstacles put in its way — all 
these signs of elemental vigor were like the forces 
of nature — simple, direct, fresh as winds and ocean." 

Justice Chase, it is now agreed, owed his 
acquittal to the effort of Luther Martin in his 
behalf. And the jurist never ceased to be 
grateful for the service. It is related, for in- 
stance, in the American Law Review, pub- 



Maryland in National Politics. 67 

lished in 1866, that some time after the im- 
peachment, Martin appeared before the dis- 
trict judge then sitting at Baltimore in a case 
with Justice Chase. On this occasion Martin, 
obviously drunk, assumed an insolent bearing 
towards the court that became intolerable. 
The district judge drew up a commitment for 
contempt and passed it to Chase for the lat- 
ter's signature. Chase, after taking up the 
pen, threw it down, declaring: "Whatever 
may be my duties as a judge, Samuel Chase 
can never sign a commitment against Luther 
Martin." 

Two years after the failure of the Jefferson 
administration to impeach Justice Chase the 
most memorable criminal trial in American 
history was staged at Richmond, Va., when 
Aaron Burr, late Vice-President, was indicted 
for high treason in levying war against the 
United States, and for a misdemeanor in or- 
ganizing a military expedition against Mex- 
ico, a country with which we were then at 
peace. It was the same Burr who had pre- 
sided over the impeachment of Chase "with 
the dignity and impartiality of an angel, but 
with the rigor of a devil," regardless of the 
fact that he was even at that time a fugitive 
from justice for killing Alexander Hamilton. 



68 Maryland in National Politics. 

The late Vice-President, "bankrupt in for- 
tune and in political standing," moved mys- 
teriously into the West after his retirement 
from office and immediately engaged in a con- 
spiracy for the founding of a great empire in 
Mexico, himself the fancied Napoleon and his 
name to be the beginning of an American dy- 
nasty. To accomplish this Burr planned the 
capture of New Orleans and possibly the de- 
tachment of the Western States from the 
Union. It was an ambitious and fascinating 
dream, and as the arch-conspirator unfolded 
it to his confidantes he won many of them to 
his cause. Jonathan Dayton was drawn into 
it, as was Daniel Clark, General Wilkinson, a 
former military comrade, and Blennerhassett, 
an Irish gentleman who had acquired an is- 
land in the Ohio River, where he had built a 
palatial home. 

And for a time the conspiracy developed 
ominously. It had appealed to hundreds of 
restless men west of the Alleghanies. Many 
yielded to it for a time without realizing the 
designs of Burr. "The panorama of the great 
West was fairly unrolled, and in the adven- 
turous, self-confident sons of the valley, heed- 
less of restraints, but in heart true to the re- 
public, despising diplomacy and ready to take 
the short cut, we perceive a fresh and distinc- 



Maryland in National Politics. 69 

tive type of American citizen. Over this sec- 
tion Burr's spell was momentarily cast, but 
his magic failed when the sinister bend of his 
plans were discovered." 

At the crucial moment Wilkinson, to whom 
Burr had entrusted all his plans, turned against 
the would-be emperor and, by carefully antici- 
pating every move, he arranged to crush the 
expedition at New Orleans before it was fairly 
under way. Martial law was declared at that 
port and the lines were carefully drawn about 
the followers of Burr, who had assembled on 
Blennerhassett's island for the final dash for 
the West. 

Meanwhile, President Jefferson was on his 
guard. Rumors had reached Washington 
even before Wilkinson could confide to the ad- 
ministration that treason against the United 
States was at the bottom of Burr's activities. 
Without delay Jefferson issued a proclamation 
denouncing the conspirators and setting the 
machinery of the government in motion to pre- 
vent the departure of the expedition and to 
capture Burr and any of his followers who 
could be apprehended. Burr, while at Natch- 
ez awaiting his "army" from the Ohio, was 
informed of Wilkinson's desertion. Abandon- 
ing the campaign, he fled precipitately into 
the interior. He was a few months later ar- 



70 Maryland in National Politics. 

rested in a little village on the Tombigbee and 
sent, under military guard, to Richmond jail. 
Blennerhassett was taken prisoner shortly aft- 
erward in Kentucky and also taken to Rich- 
mond. 

On May 22, 1807, Aaron Burr was placed 
on trial, charged with the most serious 
crime a nation may make against a citizen. 
John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, presided, while 
beside him sat Cyrus Griffin, judge of the 
United States District Court of Virginia. The 
little courtroom was crowded to the doors. 
Ranged opposite each other at the bar were 
the eminent counsel for the government and 
for the prisoner. 

And a dramatic circumstance of that melo- 
dramatic situation was the fact that, facing 
each other at that trial table, sat Luther Mar- 
tin and William Wirt, two of the greatest 
Marylanders who ever addressed a jury. 
Martin was there as the defender of Aaron 
Burr, the ablest by far of all the prisoner's 
counsel. Wirt appeared as the prosecutor of 
traitors who had sought to undermine the 
very foundations of the republic. Before that 
legal battle was concluded these two men had 
achieved a renown that echoed throughout the 
civilized world. 



Maryland in National Politics. 71 

In no material respect were these two Mary- 
landers alike. Martin was many years older 
than his rival. He was bold, fearless, con- 
temptuous, determined. His blows were de- 
livered with the force of a sledgehammer. At 
times he was the embodiment of cold, merci- 
less logic. Then he would brush aside ob- 
stacles with no attempt at reasoning, and gain 
by sheer audacity what he might not have at- 
tained by milder processes. He was at all 
times overbearing, and often brutal in his re- 
joinders. 

Wirt, on the other hand, was fluent and 
fiery. His shafts had the keenness of a rapier 
rather than the smashing effect of a battle ax. 
His appeal was more human, more vivid, more 
sympathetic than the argument of his oppo- 
nent. At times his eloquence was overpower- 
ing, though he obviously tried to repress his 
impassioned impulses and restrain his fertile 
imagination as he charged and countered the 
defence. Wirt's brilliant effort in this case 
still holds a place among the oratorical clas- 
sics of American court procedure, though it 
did not at the time have the weight that 
marked the less spectacular argument of Mar- 
tin. 

In addition to Wirt, there were on the side 
of the government Attorney-General Rodney, 



72 Maryland in National Politics. 

George Hay, a close personal friend of Jeffer- 
son, and Alexander McRae, Lieutenant-Gov- 
ernor of Virginia, and one of the most success- 
ful lawyers in the State. Flanking Martin on 
the other side were Edmond Randolph, At- 
torney-General and Secretary of State in 
Washington's Cabinet; John Wickham, of the 
Richmond bar; Benjamin Botts, Charles Lee 
and Jack Baker. There was, too, back of the 
prosecution the whole weight of the Jefferson 
administration. 

The trial was long and bitterly conducted. 
The usual amenities were absent. Counsel 
thundered at each other daily and almost hour- 
ly. Repeatedly the Chief Justice was forced 
to admonish the lawyers against personalities 
and unbecoming asperity, but the opposing 
legal batteries would only momentarily cease 
their fire. And the feeling shown, particu- 
larly by the defence, was strongly intensified 
by the attitude of the President. Jefiferson 
had long hated Martin, but no longer than 
Martin had hated Jefiferson, and many of 
Martin's thrusts had a higher target than the 
government's lawyers in the case. One of the 
Marylander's most vehement outbursts came 
in connection with a subpoena which he asked 
the Court to issue for the President, who had 
in his possession letters and other papers of 



Maryland in National Politics. 73 

value to the defence. In arguing his motion 
Martin said: 

"All that we want is the copies of some papers and 
the original of another. This is a peculiar case, sir. 
The President has undertaken to prejudge my client 
by declaring 'of his guilt there can be no doubt.' He 
has assumed the knowledge of the Supreme Being 
himself, and pretended to search the heart of my 
highly respected friend. He has proclaimed him a 
traitor in the face of that country which has re- 
warded him. He has let slip the dogs of war, the 
hell-hounds of persecution, to hunt down my friend. 
And would this President of the United States, who 
has raised all this absurd clamor, pretend to keep 
back the papers which are wanted for this trial, 
where life itself is at stake? It is a sacred principle, 
that in all such cases, the accused has the right to 
all the evidence necessary for his defense." 

It was this savage arraignment, followed by 
the ruling of Chief Justice Marshall to the 
effect that the President is not absolved from 
the obligations of citizenship and was, there- 
fore, subject to subpoena, that aroused Jeffer- 
son's rage and brought forth his famous letter 
to his prosecutor. Hay. In this the President 
said: 

"The leading feature of the Constitution is the in- 
dependence of the Legislative, Executive and Judi- 
ciary of each other; and none are more jealous of 
this than the judiciary. But would the Executive be 
independent of the Judiciary if he were subject to 
the commands of the latter, and to imprisonment for 
disobedience; if the smaller courts could bandy him 



74 Maryland in National Politics. 

from pilliar to post, keep him constantly trudging 
from north to south and east to west, and withdraw 
him entirely from his duties?" 

The one great issue in the Burr trial was, 
however, the interpretation of that clause of 
the Constitution which declares that "Treason 
against the United States shall consist only in 
levying war against them," and "That no per- 
son shall be convicted of treason unless on the 
testimony of two witnesses to the same overt 
act or on confession in open court." The pros- 
ecution failed to produce testimony that Burr 
had committed any such overt act, and the 
Chief Justice, in his charge to the jury, vir- 
tually instructed them to bring in a verdict of 
not guilty. The misdemeanor charge was like- 
wise disposed of by a verdict to the same ef- 
fect, and the Burr trial, the most noteworthy 
in our criminal annals, came to an end. 

In this, as in the Chase impeachment, Lu- 
ther Martin, upon whom rested the burden 
of the defence, was signally victorious. His 
successive triumphs in these two all-absorbing 
trials gave him a standing at the American bar 
enjoyed by but few great lawyers in our his- 
tory. He figured, however, in but one other 
lawsuit of nation-wide importance. This was 
the celebrated case of McCulloch vs. Mary- 
land, involving the right of Congress to in- 



Maryland in National Politics. 75 

corporate a national bank. Martin appeared 
for the State, along with Hopkinson and Wal- 
ter Jones. Opposing him were Daniel Webs- 
ter, William Wirt and William Pinkney. 
Martin lost his case, probably because he was 
arguing against that Federalism for which he 
had stood for a decade. He had been one of 
the original States' rights leaders in the early 
days, had then gone bodily over to the Fed- 
eralists and, in this litigation, had returned 
once more to the faith of his youth. 

Martin's private life was in disappointing 
contrast to his standing as a great advocate. 
No excuse can be offered for his drunkenness, 
a habit that pursued him through life. Withal, 
he was a man of wonderful success in his pro- 
fession, and the fact was recognized through- 
out the whole nation. His high station among 
the members of the bar is illustrated by one of 
the quaintest legislative acts ever placed upon 
the statute books of a State. In 1822, after 
Martin had been stricken with paralysis and 
incapacitated for business, the General As- 
sembly of Maryland passed the following 
resolution: 

"Resolved, That each and every practitioner of 
law in the State, shall be, and is hereby compelled, 
from and after the passage of this resolution, to ob- 
tain from the clerk of the county court in which he 



76 Maryland in National Politics. 

may practice, a license to authorize him to so prac- 
tice, for which he shall pay annually on or before the 
first day of June, the sum of five dollars, which said 
sum is to be deposited by the clerk of the county 
court, from which he may procure said license, in 
the treasury of the Western or Eastern shore, as the 
case may be, subject to the order of Thomas Kell 
and William H. Winder, Esquires, who are hereby 
appointed trustees for the appropriation of the pro- 
ceeds raised by the virtue of this resolution, to the 
use of Luther Martin; Provided,, That nothing here- 
in contained shall be taken to compel a practitioner 
of law to obtain a license in more than one Court, 
to be annually renewed under penalty of being sus- 
pended at the bar at which he may practice. And 
Provided, That this resolution shall cease to be valid 
at the death of the said Luther Martin." 

Martin was now a physical and mental 
wreck. ''His vast learning was hidden in the 
oblivious darkness of an extinguished intel- 
lect." Through excessive drinking his for- 
tune had been wasted away. Broken in health 
and penniless, this great Marylander was pre- 
vented from becoming a public charge by 
Aaron Burr, the man whom Martin had prob- 
ably saved from the hangman's gallows. Of 
this charity Chief Justice Taney, in his auto- 
biography, says "The only good thing I know 
of Colonel Burr is that, soon after this hap- 
pened, he took Mr. Martin to his house and 
provided for his wants, taking care of him 
until his death." 



Maryland in National Politics. 77 

SAMUEL CHASE 

1741 — 1811 

During all our history the power of im- 
peachment for "treason, bribery, or other 
high crimes and misdemeanors," lodged in 
Congress by Article 2, Section 4, of the Fed- 
eral Constitution has been invoked only nine 
times, a circumstance which is its own tribute 
to the integrity of our public officials. 

And this tribute is more pronounced when 
the fact is recalled that, in the nine impeach- 
ment proceedings, only three of the accused 
officials were convicted. One President, one 
Cabinet officer, one Senator and six judges 
have been arraigned before the Senate, 
charged by the House of Representatives with 
malfeasance or maladministration in office, 
and verdicts of acquittal were found in all in- 
stances, except the cases of three judges. 

The most famous trial in this category was, 
of course, that of Andrew Johnson, President 
of the United States, who was haled before 
the bar of the Senate in 1868 to answer a 
series of charges involving ursurpation of 
power by the Executive. He escaped re- 
moval from office by the narrow margin of 



78 Maryland in National Politics. 

one vote, 34 Senators moving for conviction 
and 16 for acquittal. In all impeachments a 
two-thirds vote is necessary to establish the 
guilt of the accused. 

First in the list of impeachment proceedings 
was that against William Blount in the year 
1798. He was a Senator from Tennessee. A 
suspicious letter from him to an Indian Agent 
fell into the hands of President Adams and 
was communicated to Congress. It indicated 
that a conspiracy was formed with representa- 
tives of the British government to alienate the 
Indians from their allegiance to this country, 
with the ultimate view of wresting Florida 
and Louisiana from Spain. Blount was first 
suspended from office, and before his case was 
determined he was formally expelled from the 
Senate. The Senatorial court then dismissed 
the impeachment, on the ground that it had no 
jurisdiction, inasmuch as a Senator is not an 
officer of the government and therefore not 
amenable to such a proceeding. 

The earliest conviction by an impeachment 
court was in the case of John Pickering, 
United States Judge for the New Hampshire 
District, who in 1803 was charged with cor- 
ruptly releasing a libelled vessel without re- 
quiring bond, of using indecent language, and 
of being drunk while on the bench. He was 



Maryland in National Politics. 79 

found guilty upon all counts by a vote of 20 
to 6. 

In 1830 James H. Peck, judge of the Dis- 
trict Court of Missouri, was acquitted on vari- 
ous charges growing out of the turbulent poli- 
tics of the day in that State, the vote being 21 
for conviction and 22 against. West H. 
Humphreys, federal judge of Tennessee, was 
found guilty in 1862 by unanimous vote of the 
Senate, of upholding the right of secession 
and of inciting rebellion, in the course of a 
public speech delivered at Nashville. 

The impeachment of William W. Belknap, 
Secretary of War, failed in 1876, when 25 
Senators out of 62 voted for acquittal. The 
vote in the case of Charles Swayne, judge of 
the Northern District of Florida, who was 
tried in 1904, was 35 for conviction and 47 
against. In the latest of the impeachment 
proceedings, however, that of Robert W. 
Archbald, judge of the Circuit Court of Penn- 
sylvania, the Senate removed him from the 
bench without the formality of a roll call. 

By far the most celebrated impeachment, in- 
volving a federal jurist, was the trial of Samuel 
Chase, of Maryland, Associate Justice of the 
United States Supreme Court. This pro- 
ceeding was staged in 1804 and because of the 
grave political issues raised, it had a significant 



8o Maryland in National Politics. 

bearing upon the early history of the republic. 
Chase had been a member of the Continental 
Congress and was a signer of the Declaration 
of Independence. In the division of the peo- 
ple into parties he had become an aggressive 
Federalist, just as he had been a determined 
Whig in the struggle with Great Britain. He 
did not abandon his political convictions when 
President Washington appointed him to the 
Supreme Court. The Jeffersonians found 
him so stubborn an obstacle to their policies 
that the impeachment was resorted to in the 
hope of removing him from his position of 
power. 



Chase had a contemporary part in the early 
annals of Maryland, as a colony and as a 
State, with such figures as Hanson, Carroll, 
Jenifer, Martin, McHenry and Samuel Smith. 
He settled in Annapolis in 1760, after having 
been admitted to the bar, and three years later 
was elected a member of the Colonial Assem- 
bly. He distinguished himself in that body 
by his obstinate opposition to the royal gov- 
ernor and to the court party, voting on one 
occasion to cut the salary of his father, a 
clergyman, in half. 

He was conspicuous, too, in the riots of 1774, 
following the passage of the Stamp Act by 



Maryland in National Politics. 8i 

Parliament. He joined the Sons of Freedom 
and took part in forcing entrance to the public 
offices, destroying the stamps and burning the 
collector in effigy. In 1775 he anticipated the 
Declaration of Independence by declaring in a 
public speech "that, by the God of Heaven, I 
owe no allegiance to the King of Great 
Britain." 

Chase was elected a delegate from his colony 
to the first Continental Congress. He was im- 
mediately appointed a member of the Commis- 
sion to Canada, with Franklin and Charles 
Carroll. When he returned from the Do- 
minion, after a fruitless effort to win that sec- 
tion to the cause of independence, he found 
Maryland still reluctant to unite with the 
other colonies in breaking from England. He 
took the stump and prosecuted a vigorous 
campaign in the counties for freedom. He 
denounced Dr. Zulby, the treacherous dele- 
gate from Georgia, and, driving that Tory out 
of the State, secured a vote of the Colonial 
Convention for an immediate separation from 
the mother country. 

Hurrying post-haste to Philadelphia, Chase 
arrived in time to sign the Declaration, along 
with other Marylanders. He prepared an ad- 
dress in 1778, published by Congress and or- 
dered to be read in all the churches, to coun- 



82 Maryland in National Politics. 

teract the report of conciliatory bills about to 
be passed by Parliament. In 1785 he boldly 
went to England to collect moneys belonging 
to Maryland, amounting in all to $650,000. 

Shortly after peace was declared. Chase re- 
moved from Annapolis to Baltimore, and in 
1788 was named as the presiding judge of the 
new criminal court, having jurisdiction over 
the city and county. Three years later he be- 
came chief justice of the general court of the 
State. His austerity and audacity as a judge 
is one of the traditions of the court history of 
Maryland. His boldness was characteristi- 
cally displayed when, in 1794, he ordered the 
arrest of two popular ringleaders of a riot. 
The sheriff hesitated to execute the warrant, 
whereupon Judge Chase descended from the 
bench, offering to serve himself as posse comi- 
tatus if nobody else could be found to appre- 
hend the criminals. This he did, though 
warned that his life and property would be 
endangered. A little later he was presented 
by a grand jury, charged with holding a place 
in two courts at the same time. Calling the 
jurymen before him, he severely arraigned 
them, ordering that they confine their activi- 
ties to their proper sphere. 

In 1796 Judge Chase was elevated to the 
Supreme Bench of the United States by Presi- 



Maryland in National Politics. 83 

dent Washington. The first few years of his 
service on that court were uneventful. Only 
one of his decisions at this period was note- 
worthy. A long, bitter contest had been 
waged from the beginning of the government 
over the question of Congress' right to levy in- 
ternal duties or excise taxes. The Constitu- 
tion had apparently intended that both the 
States and the federal government should have 
this same right, yet the first levies by Congress 
on liquors and other articles were exceedingly 
unpopular, causing, among other things, the 
Pennsylvania whiskey insurrection. 

A few months after Chase went upon the 
Supreme Bench a case reached that court 
making a test of the constitutionality of the 
excises imposed by Congress. One Daniel 
Lawrence Hylton, of Virginia, had resisted 
the payment of the tax, and by successive 
stages the litigation reached the highest tri- 
bunal. It was of such widespread interest 
and importance that many of the leading law- 
yers of the day took sides in the argument. 
Alexander Hamilton and Attorney-General 
Charles Lee appeared for the government. 
District Attorney Campbell, of Virginia, and 
Attorney-General Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania, 
represented the plaintiff. Associate Justice 
Chase delivered the opinion of the Court, 



84 Maryland in National Politics. 

holding that the excise tax could be constitu- 
tionally levied by the federal government. 
This decision has, since that time, rendered it 
possible for the government to raise hundreds 
of millions of dollars "internal revenue" upon 
liquors, tobacco, wines, beer and many other 
articles of domestic manufacture. 

In politics Chase had originally been strongly 
anti-Federalist. He joined with Luther Mar- 
tin in opposing the ratification by Maryland 
of the Federal Constitution. He took the 
ground that the new organic act tended too 
strongly toward the absorption of the States. 
After the Constitution had become effective 
and the State government had been reorgan- 
ized, he continued as the leader of the States' 
rights forces in Maryland until about the time 
he went upon the Supreme Court. 

In the contest between Jefferson and Adams, 
however. Chase completely reversed himself 
upon national issues and became one of the 
most ardent exponents of Federalism. This 
was particularly true in so far as the independ- 
ence of the federal judiciary was concerned. 
And, instead of retiring from the forum when 
raised to the bench. Chase continued his out- 
spoken adherence to the Federalist principles. 
Nor can it be doubted that his judicial acts 



Maryland in National Politics. 85 

were in many instances tainted with a political 
coloring. 

About this time President Jefferson, the ab- 
solute dictator of the dominant party, began 
to show marked evidence of impatience at the 
jurisdiction the judiciary assumed over the 
legislative and executive departments of the 
government. This dissatisfaction became most 
pronounced when, in 1803, Chief Justice Mar- 
shall delivered the unanimous opinion of the 
Supreme Court in the case of Marbury vs. 
Madison, in which the court refused to apply 
an act of Congress conferring on them the 
power to issue a mandamus to the Secretary 
of State. The Court found this act unconsti- 
tutional, but, after handing down the opinion, 
the Chief Justice boldly lectured the adminis- 
tration upon the President's duty to issue a 
commission to the plaintiff. 

This lecture was bitterly resented by Jeffer- 
son, who referred to it as "an obiter disserta- 
tion of the Chief Justice and a perversion of 
the law." In the same year John Pickering 
was removed from office by impeachment, 
after a trial which had been instigated wholly 
by the administration leaders. This proceed- 
ing has been denounced as "arbitrary, illegal 
and infamous," yet it emboldened the Jeffer- 
son followers and persuaded them that the 



86 Maryland in National Politics. 

Supreme Court itself might be measurably 
chastened by a similar ordeal. The attitude 
of the administration at this time toward the 
functions of the judiciary might be clearly in- 
dicated by the remarks of Senator William B. 
Giles, of Virginia, a Jefferson leader. The 
declaration of the Virginian is reported by 
John Quincy Adams in his memoirs, as fol- 
lows : 

"In the course of a conversation, Giles treated 
with the utmost contempt the idea of an independent 
judiciary. He said there was not a word about such 
independence in the Constitution, and that their pre- 
tentions to it were nothing more or less than an at- 
tempt to establish an aristocratic despotism in them- 
selves. The power of impeachment was given with- 
out limitation to the House of Representatives; the 
power of trying impeachments was given equally 
without limitation to the Senate; and if the judges 
of the Supreme Court should dare, as they had done, 
to declare an Act of Congress unconstitutional, or 
to send a mandamus to the Secretary of State, as 
they had done, it was the undoubted right of the 
House to impeach them, and of the State to remove 
them, for giving such opinions, however honest or 
sincere they may have been in entertaining them. 
A removal by impeachment was nothing more or less 
than a declaration by Congress to the effect: You 
hold dangerous opinions, and if you are suffered to 
carry them into effect you will work the destruction 
of the nation. We want your offices for the pur- 
pose of giving them to men who will fill them bet- 
ter." 



Maryland in National Politics. 87 

As a result of this state of mind on the part 
of the majority party, Justice Chase easily be- 
came a target for the assaults of the Republi- 
cans. He was an overbearing man and a can- 
did partisan, though his great ability, his ab- 
solute integrity and fearlessness as a patriot 
could not be questioned. Moreover, he had 
sat in the Circuit Court of Pennsylvania dur- 
ing the trial of one Fries, charged with trea- 
son in the whiskey rebellion, and of Callender, 
a Republican editor indicted under the Sedi- 
tion Act. The latter was charged with hav- 
ing libelled President Adams. In each of 
these cases the Associate Justice had been be- 
trayed, as was alleged, into the use of violent 
language from the bench. A little later Chase, 
in delivering a charge to the grand jury in Bal- 
timore, severely arraigned the Jefferson ad- 
ministration. This incident was the immedi- 
ate cause of the impeachment which followed. 

At this period the minds of the people were 
still centered upon the impeachment of War- 
ren Hastings by the House of Lords and by 
the judgment rendered in that case. That 
trial, coupled with the success of the adminis- 
tration in removing Judge Pickering, incited 
the Jefferson leaders to the most vigorous ef- 
forts against Chase. The President himself 
took the lead, when in a letter to Representa- 



88 Maryland in National Politics. 

tive Joseph Nicholson, of Maryland, who had 
managed the impeachment of Judge Picker- 
son, he said: 

"You must have heard of the extraordinary 
charge of Chase to the Grand Jury at Baltimore. 
Ought this seditious and official attack on the prin- 
ciples of our Constitution and on the proceeding of 
a State to go unpunished? And to whom so point- 
edly as yourself will the public look for the neces- 
sary measures? I ask these questions for your con- 
sideration. As for myself, it is better that I should 
not interfere." 

Nicholson, however, did not take the initia- 
tive. John Randolph of Roanoke, the floor 
leader of the administration, oflfered the reso- 
lution, which was adopted in the House by an 
overwhelming vote. On November 30, 1804, 
the House formally presented its resolution to 
the Senate, and on December 14 the Senate, 
on motion, ordered "that when the managers 
of the impeachment shall be introduced to the 
bar of the Senate and shall have signified that 
they are ready to exhibit articles of impeach- 
ment against Samuel Chase, the President of 
the Senate shall direct the Sergeant-at-Armsto 
make proclamation in the following words: 
"All persons are commanded to keep silence, 
on pain of imprisonment, while the grand in- 
quest of the nation is exhibiting to the Senate 
of the United States articles of impeachment 



Maryland in National Politics. 89 

against Samuel Chase, one of the Associate 
Justices of the Supreme Court of the United 
States." 

The managers for the House were Repre- 
sentatives Randolph, Rodney, Nicholson, 
Early, Boyle, Nelson and Campbell. Ran- 
dolph was chairman and the spokesman of ad- 
ministration forces. Chase was defended by 
Luther Martin, whose individual part in the 
trial is referred to in detail in the preceding 
chapter; former Attorney-General Charles 
Lee, Joseph Hopkinson and Philip Barton 
Key. No abler array of legal talent than that 
ranged in opposing columns at the opening of 
this trial could have been assembled in Amer- 
ica at that period. 

Aaron Burr, then Vice-President of the 
United States, presided over this trial, and to 
his love of the spectacular was no doubt due 
the arrangement of the Senate chamber dur- 
ing the solemn proceedings. On the right and 
on the left of the presiding officer's chair were 
placed two rows of benches, which were cov- 
ered with crimson cloth. On these benches 
the Senators, acting as judges, sat. 

Before the jurymen a temporary semi-circu- 
lar gallery was raised. This was elevated on 
pillars and was covered wholly by cloth of bril- 
liant green. To this section the women, who 



90 Maryland in National Politics. 

attended in throngs, were ushered. Under this 
improvised gallerywere three rows of benches, 
one rising slightly above the other. These 
were also covered by green and were reserved 
for the members of the House of Representa- 
tives, members of the Diplomatic Corps and 
heads of the executive departments. 

Immediately in front of this amphitheatre 
and facing the right and left of the Vice-Pres- 
ident were two boxes covered with blue cloth. 
One of them was occupied by the managers on 
the part of the House, and the other by the ac- 
cused and his counsel. Never was a trial by 
impeachment or otherwise on this democratic 
continent more elaborately staged or more dra- 
matically conducted. 

The Senators who sat as jurors in this trial 
were James Hillhouse and Uriah Tracy, of 
Connecticut; James A. Bayard and Samuel 
White, of Delaware; Abraham Baldwin and 
James Jackson, of Georgia; John Brown and 
John Breckinridge, of Kentucky; Robert 
Wright and Samuel Smith, of Maryland; 
Timothy Pickering and John Quincy Adams, 
of Massachusetts; Simeon Olcott and William 
Plumer, of New Hampshire; Jonathan Day- 
ton and John Condit, of New Jersey; John 
Smith and Samuel L. Mitchell, of New York; 
Jesse Franklin and David Stone, of North 



Maryland in National Politics. 91 

Carolina; John Smith and Thomas Worthing- 
ton, of Ohio; George Logan and Samuel Ma- 
clay, of Pennsylvania; Christopher Ellery and 
Samuel J. Potter, of Rhode Island; Thomas 
Sumter and Pierce Butler, of South Caro- 
lina; Joseph Anderson and William Cocke, of 
Tennessee; Stephen R. Bradley and Israel 
Smith, of Vermont, and William B. Giles 
and Wilson C. Nicholson, of Virginia. 

Eight articles were contained in the im- 
peachment charge against the Maryland jur- 
ist. They reviewed the judicial conduct of 
the accused in a number of cases, beginning 
with the prosecution of Fries and extending 
over a period of eight years. The article, 
however, upon which the prosecution based its 
strongest hope and that intended to show most 
pointedly the political bias of the jurist, was 
the eighth and last. It was as follows: 

"And whereas mutual respect and confidence be- 
tween the government of the United States and those 
of the individual States and between the people and 
those governments, respectively, are highly condu- 
cive to that public harmony without which there can 
be no public happiness, yet the said Samuel Chase, 
disregarding the duties and dignity of his judicial 
character, did at a Circuit Court, for the District of 
Maryland, held at Baltimore in the month of May, 
1805, pervert his official right and duty to address 
The Grand Jury then and there assembled on the 
matters coming within the province of the Grand 



92 Maryland in National Politics. 

Jury, for the purpose of delivering to the said Grand 
Jury an intemperate and inflammatory political 
harangue, with intent to excite the fears and resent- 
ment of the said Grand Jury and of the good people 
of Maryland against their State government and 
Constitution, a conduct highly censurable in any, 
but peculiarly indecent and unbecoming any judge 
of the Supreme Court of the United States; and, 
that the said Samuel Chase then and there, under 
pretense of exercising his judicial right to address 
the said Grand Jury as aforesaid, did, in a manner 
higjily unvv'arrantable, endeavor to excite the odium 
of the said Grand Jury and of the good people of 
Maryland against the Government of the United 
States by delivering opinions which, even if the ju- 
dicial authority were competent to their expression 
on a suitable occasion and in a proper manner, were 
at that time and as delivered by him, highly indecent, 
extra-judicial, and tending to prostitute the high 
judicial character with which he was invested to the 
low purpose of an electioneering partisan." 

Extended testimony was taken upon each of 
the articles in the impeachment. It has filled 
two volumes and composes the most elaborate 
record ever made in such a trial before the 
United States Senate. The argument of the 
managers and the counsel for the defence was 
marked with the greatest bitterness. In this 
Luther Martin and John Randolph led. Ran- 
dolph was but thirty-one years of age, but he 
had already displayed great ability in the 
House and was renowned because of his caus- 
tic wit and sarcastic eloquence. Martin, on 



Maryland in National Politics. 93 

the other hand, was much more of a veteran in 
the practice of law and far more profound in 
his interpretation of constitutional issues. 

The trial continued from November 30, 
1804, until March i, 1805. During that time 
practically all other business was suspended 
by the House and Senate. The upper branch 
of Congress gave itself over entirely to the im- 
peachment, and the House attended the hear- 
ings each day in a body. This was in marked 
contrast with the Archbald impeachment in 
1913, the latest of the trials of this character. 
For days during this later proceeding the Sen- 
ate Chamber was practically empty. Even 
when the arguments were made it was difficult 
to maintain a quorum. Only when the vote 
came which convicted the Pennsylvania judge 
was the Senate chamber filled or the galleries 
crowded. 

On March i, 1805, the Senate voted upon 
each of the articles exhibited by the House 
against Justice Chase. In every case the di- 
vision was substantially the same. On the 
eighth and crucial vote the following Sena- 
tors pronounced the Marylander guilty: An- 
derson, Baldwin, Breckinridge, Brown, Cocke, 
Condit, Ellery, Franklin, Giles, Howland, 
Jackson, Logan, Maclay, Moore, Smith of 



94 Maryland in National Politics. 

Maryland, Stone, Sumter, Worthington and 
Wright. 

Those Senators voting not guilty were 
Adams, Bayard, Bradley, Dayton, Gaillard, 
Hillhouse, Mitchell, Olcott, Pickering, Plu- 
mer, Smith of New York, Smith of Ohio, 
Smith of Vermont, Tracy and White. 

Nineteen Senators had stood for conviction 
and fifteen for acquittal. The two-thirds nec- 
essary to impeach failing, Vice-President 
Burr arose in his chair and declared: 

"The President declares that Samuel Chase, one of 
the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, is ac- 
quitted of all the charges of impeachment exhibited 
against him by the House of Representatives; and 
the Court is adjourned without day." 

This ended the first impeachment in our 
history, inspired purely by political consider- 
ations. It was to be followed in later years by 
an attempt to remove the head of the govern- 
ment itself by similiar procedure, and in each 
case the efifort met failure. Only in the case 
of Judge Humphreys has an official of the 
government been removed on any other than 
criminal grounds. 

The Blount, Pickering and Chase impeach- 
ments were the first experiments of our gov- 
ernment in turning one branch of Congress 
into a grand jury and the other into a court of 
justice. These proceedings were found to be 



Maryland in National Politics. 95 

immensely tedious and expensive. Except in 
the cases of Chase and Andrew Johnson, in- 
terest in the impeachments on the part of the 
people has not been sustained. The Hastings 
trial in England had undoubtedly accentuated 
popular attention upon that of the Marylander 
before the American Senate. Yet these two 
proceedings were in sharp contrast in many of 
their essential elements. For instance, one 
historian has said that "the impeachment of 
Judge Chase was a cold and colorless per- 
formance, beside the melodramatic splendor 
of the Hastings trial; but in the infinite possi- 
bilities of American democracy, the questions 
to be decided in the Senate chamber had a 
weight for future ages beyond any that were 
then settled in the House of Lords." 

Judge Chase lived six years after his ac- 
quittal. He returned to the court immediately 
after the deciding vote was cast and remained 
constantly on the bench until the end came. 
His partisanship abated measurably in after 
years and his judicial record, aside from the 
indiscretions of his earlier service, is declared 
by students of Supreme Court decisions to be 
of a decidedly superior character. 



96 Maryland in National Politics. 

GENERAL SAMUEL SMITH 

1752— 1839 

From the very beginning of the republic 
down to the present day Marylanders have 
had conspicuous parts in its afifairs. They have 
led its armies; they have represented it in for- 
eign courts; they made its laws, executed its 
laws and interpreted those laws from its Su- 
preme Bench. The list of names is long, but 
the record of achievements is longer. To- 
gether, they form a galaxy in which the State 
may feel an honest pride. 

And while there may have been many more 
brilliant, more spectacular, more profound 
figures in Maryland's gallery of great men, 
there has never been one who gave so many 
years of his life to the public service as did 
General Samuel Smith. There has never been 
one who consecrated himself more faithfully 
and patriotically to the common welfare of all 
the people of his country. 

Soldier first, then statesman, soldier again, 
statesman again, soldier a third time — his ca- 
reer was decidedly unique. He was, during 
his eventful life, a veteran of the Revolution- 
ary War, a veteran of the Federal House of 



Maryland in National Politics. 97 

Representatives, a veteran of the War of 181 2 
and a veteran of the United States Senate. 
Lastly, he withdrew from the halls of Con- 
gress that he might wear until the end the 
uniform as major-general of the Maryland 
State militia. And as a sort of valedictory to 
a long and honorable civil record, he was 
elected Mayor of Baltimore, a city he loved 
with a consuming passion. 

In all the history of this government there 
has been but one man who enjoyed a longer 
continuous service in the Federal Congress 
than did General Smith. For even forty years 
this Marylander sat in the House and Senate. 
William B. Allison, of Iowa, broke this rec- 
ord seventy years later, when he rounded out 
forty-four years of unbroken service in these 
two legislative bodies. It is true that during 
his time General Smith engaged in the War 
of 18 1 2 as a brigadier-general of the Mary- 
land troops; also that he was Acting Secre- 
tary of the Navy in Jefferson's Cabinet. Bur 
these duties did not deprive him of a seat in 
one or the other branch of the national legisla- 
ture from the beginning of the Third Congress 
until the end of the Twenty-second Congress. 

Moreover, General Smith served for two 
long periods, alternately, in each, the House 
and Senate, a fact paralleled only by the career 



98 Maryland in National Politics. 

of Henry Clay. The Marylander sat for ten 
years, from 1793 to 1803, in the House; then 
for twelve years in the Senate. For seven years 
thereafter he returned to the House, and from 
1822 to 1833, a period of eleven years, he for 
a second time represented Maryland in the 
Senate. And as a crowning honor. General 
Smith was twice elected president pro tempore 
of that body, the only representative of his 
State in history who has been designated to 
preside over the deliberations of the United 
States Senate. 

During these forty years General Smith 
saw seven Presidents inaugurated. He en- 
tered the House during Washington's admin- 
istration, and saw John Adams, Jefiferson, 
Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams 
come and go. Lingering yet a few years upon 
the stage, he saw the first term of Andrew 
Jackson pass into history. And though dur- 
ing this long period he did not occupy the ex- 
alted station attained by many of his contem- 
poraries, yet his name is associated prominent- 
ly with many of the stirring events of his time. 



Regardless of the fact that General Smith 
sat longer in Congress than any Marylander 
before or after him, and longer than any man 



Maryland in National Politics. 99 

from any State, with the single exception of 
Senator Allison, he wore his military title 
from the beginning to the end of his public ca- 
reer. This, too, in spite of the further cir- 
cumstance that his place in history has not 
been fixed by military achievements. 

In the House, in the Senate, in the Cabinet 
and in the Mayor's chair, he was always "Gen- 
eral" Smith. He was so addressed by Repre- 
sentatives and Senators on the floor. He was 
so known to all historians and biographers, 
and was himself more proud of his military 
service than of all other honors heaped upon 
him by the State and the nation. 

From early manhood until his death Gen- 
eral Smith was associated with the military es- 
tablishment. He organized a company of vol- 
unteers in 1775 in Baltimore and marched at 
their head into the Revolutionary Army. He 
was promoted for gallantry to be major, then 
to be lieutenant-colonel. Returning to Balti- 
more at the end of this war, he was commis- 
sioned a brigadier-general of the State militia. 

Still a brigadier. General Smith was sent to 
Congress, then to the United States Senate. 
After a few months as Acting Secretary of the 
Navy, he was called by his State to lead its 
troops in defence of Baltimore against the 
British invasion in 1814. At the close of his 



loo Maryland in National Politics. 

second period in the Senate he returned to 
Baltimore again and was designated as major- 
general of the State guard. He held that com- 
mission until he died in 1839. 

Although General Smith was a military 
hero to all Marylanders, it was his career as a 
legislator with which this brief review of his 
life is intended to deal. His bravery on the 
battlefield was no more distinguished than his 
labors in behalf of constitutional government 
in America. He devoted forty years of con- 
structive statesmanship to the nation which he 
had helped to create with the sword, and those 
four decades determined whether or not the 
American experiment was fit to survive. 

When Samuel Smith entered the Third Con- 
gress Washington was still President. A sem- 
blance of order had been evolved from the 
chaos of the Revolution. The States had 
yielded to common necessity and united under 
the Constitution. An executive administration 
had been organized; courts had been estab- 
lished; a standing army had been formed and 
the foundations laid for a federal system. It 
is true that our foreign relations were still un- 
settled; our western frontiers were faced by 
British forts, and the Mississippi River was 
closed against us by the French, yet independ- 



Maryland in National Politics, ioi 

ence had been won and our national life had 
been begun. 

When Samuel Smith retired from the 
United States Senate, two generations later, 
he retired from a government planted upon 
solid rock. It had fought and won another 
war. It had defied France and Spain and had 
dictated terms to them. It had acquired an 
empire beyond the Mississippi greater than 
the area of the original colonies. Its Constitu- 
tion had been vindicated, and under that in- 
strument a genuine democracy held out its 
promise to all mankind. This transition from 
national uncertainty to national security came 
to pass while General Smith yet remained 
upon the scene. 

During this forty-year period the Maryland 
statesman was identified in some degree with 
every great issue that was raised in Congress, 
and in three of the famous parliamentary bat- 
tles of his time he stood out as the central fig- 
ure. He was a leader in the contest for the 
abolishment of the Congressional caucus for 
the nomination of Presidential candidates; 
again, in the controversy between the propo- 
nents and the opponents of a national bank, 
and yet again, in the movement for the recov- 
ery by the United States of its West Indian 
trade. 



102 Maryland in National Politics. 

The bitterest fight in which General Smith 
engaged as a legislator was that against the 
Congressional caucus as a method of picking 
candidates for the Presidency. This ultimate- 
ly put Smith in a position of hostility with the 
Madison administration, developed a feud be- 
tween him and Secretary of the Treasury Gal- 
latin, and ended in his brother Robert Smith 
being dismissed from the Secretaryship of 
State by the President. The story is an inter- 
esting one. 

In 1801 General Smith was still a member 
of the House. He had become a power in that 
body, taking rank with Livingston, Gallatin, 
Macon, Otis, Bayard, Harper and Pinkney. 
Therefore, when Jefferson was casting about 
for a Secretary of the Navy, the Maryland 
Congressman pressed vigorously and success- 
fully the claims of his brother, Robert Smith, 
to the office. 

His family having been properly recognized 
by the new Executive, General Smith became 
one of the most ardent of administration sup- 
porters. He stood firmly with Jefferson in de- 
livering the central government into the hands 
of Republicans. He aided in defeating all 
the Federalist legislation and, until the Ran- 
dolph revolt against Jefferson in 1806, Smith 
was strongly leaned upon by the new regime. 



Maryland in National Politics. 103 

Meantime, however, Smith had been pro- 
moted to the Senate. Also the second admin- 
istration of Jefferson was coming to a close. A 
spirited fight over the succession to the Presi- 
dency had arisen between James Madison, 
Secretary of State, and James Monroe, then 
Minister to Great Britain. Jefferson, who 
dominated his party absolutely, had picked 
Madison for the nomination and, though the 
"Quids," led by Randolph, were pushing 
Monroe, the word of Jefferson prevailed and 
Monroe directed that his name be not pre- 
sented to the caucus. 

At that period and for several years there- 
after Presidential candidates were chosen by a 
caucus of party adherents in the two branches 
of Congress. The stifling of Monroe's candi- 
dacy at this time, however, aroused the first 
open opposition to this method of nominating 
Presidential tickets. Only89outof 139 Repub- 
lican Senators and Representatives were pres- 
ent when Madison was picked to head the Jef- 
ferson ticket. Some of the Republicans were 
absent because of sickness, but more of them 
stayed away because of Jefferson's arbitrary 
position in Madison's behalf. 

Shortly after this caucus was held General 
Smith organized a body of "schismatic" Re- 
publicans in a protest to the country, first, 



I04 Maryland in National Politics. 

against the whole system of naming candi- 
dates, and second, against the alleged irregu- 
larity in the nomination of Madison. An open 
letter was signed by seventeen members of 
Congress, including Smith, John Randolph, 
Joseph Clay and George Clinton, Jr. The 
malcontents, however, were uable to agree 
upon either Monroe or George Clinton, Sr., 
as a candidate, and the whole insurgent move- 
ment, in so far as the campaign was concerned, 
fell through. In less than fifteen years, how- 
ever, the party caucus, against which the re- 
volters were then proceeding, was abolished as 
the nominating machinery for national parties. 
After his election Madison made an effort 
to placate General Smith, whose infleunce was 
strongest among the factionalists, by appoint- 
ing the General's brother, Robert Smith, Sec- 
retary of State. Albert Gallatin, one of the 
ablest men of his day in either party, had as- 
pired to the State portfolio. The great body of 
Republicans throughout the country felt that 
he should have been named. But the new 
President had adopted a policy of temporiz- 
ing with the opposition within his party and 
headed his list of Cabinet appointments with 
the name of the former Secretary of the Navy. 
Gallatin was made Secretary of the Treasury. 



Maryland in National Politics. 105 

The well-meant policy of Madison's, de- 
signed to harmonize the differences between 
his party associates, did not, however, prove 
an effective remedy. Important legislation 
was pending as a reprisal against the outrages 
committed by Great Britain just before the 
War of 1812. The Macon bill, supported by 
the President, excluding all English and 
French war and merchant ships from Ameri- 
can harbors, had passed the House. But to 
the amazement of the administration, it was 
emasculated beyond recognition by the Senate. 

This Senatorial revolt against Madison and 
his friends was led by General Samuel Smith, 
and had for its object, not the embarrassment 
of the President, but had the banishment from 
the Cabinet of Gallatin. The old feud be- 
tween the Smiths and Gallatin had lately come 
to a climax when the Secretary of the Treas- 
ury brought about an exposure of some irregu- 
lar operations of the Navy Department while 
Robert Smith was its head. Gallatin had in- 
timated pointedly that public money had been 
used by the Smiths for family purposes, and 
the scandal had been used in a vain effort to 
prevent the re-election of General Smith to the 
Senate. 

For a full year after this first revolt on the 
part of the Smith faction in the Senate, Presi- 



io6 Maryland in National Politics. 

dent Madison's influence over Congress was 
defeated. In their determination to neutral- 
ize Gallatin's position in the administration 
the Smiths, one the Premier and the other the 
Senator, worked tirelessly. And their cam- 
paign reached the President as well. ''Navi- 
gation bills, bank recharter, measures for 
strengthening the army — whatever Gallatin, 
and presumably the administration, favored," 
says one historian, "struck on some hidden 
rock in the Senate and sank." 

When the bank recharter bill failed, Galla- 
tin tendered his resignation to the President. 
Meanwhile Madison's eyes had been opened, 
and he determined that his administration 
should not be discredited by intriguing Cabi- 
net oflicers. He declined to accept Gallatin's 
resignation, but he sent for the Secretary of 
State and offered the Marylander the mission 
to Russia. Seeing that he was about to be 
shelved, Robert Smith angrily resigned. This 
ended the second famous Cabinet feud in our 
early history and, by a singular coincidence, 
the official displaced in each of them was a 
Marylander. James McHenry was the first 
and Robert Smith the second. 

The part played by General Smith in the 
long and stubborn controversy over theBankof 
the United States was, however, more vital, in 



Maryland in National Politics. 107 

a national sense, than his insurgency against 
the Madison administration. As already 
stated, he had prevented the rechartering of 
this institution in 181 1, but his motive in that 
fight was opposition to Gallatin and not the 
bank. He later stood aside and permitted the 
Republican majorities in the two houses to 
grant this charter in 1816, but three years aft- 
erward he became engulfed in a scandal grow- 
ing out of that institution's Baltimore branch, 
which wiped out his personal fortune and 
came dangerously near destroying him politi- 
cally. 

Shortly after the bank had been rechartered 
the Spencer investigation was ordered by the 
House of Representatives. This inquiry was 
made in 18 19, and its report disclosed an ap- 
palling state of afifairs in the management of 
the Baltimore branch. This report revealed 
the fact that its principal officers were its larg- 
est debtors; that its president, Buchanan, was 
guilty of gross maladministration, and that 
other officers had united in committing 
breaches of trust for their personal gain. 

As soon as these revelations were published, 
Buchanan, McCulloch, the cashier, and many 
of the directors were summarily dismissed. 
They offered the bank additional security for 
their debts to it, and after great difficulty this 



io8 Maryland in National Politics. 

was raised to the extent of $900,000. Even 
this restitution did not save the officers from 
disgrace, but they were, on the contrary, 
turned out of office. 

This same Buchanan was the junior partner 
in the great commercial house of Smith & 
Buchanan. General Samuel Smith was the 
senior member. Immediately following the 
disclosures of the Spencer investigation the 
firm, which had been one of the foremost in 
the country and which was, by odds, the lead- 
ing house in Baltimore, went to the wall. And 
as it failed, it carried with it many lesser 
houses in the city and State. 

The historian Schouler graphically de- 
scribes in his American history the Baltimore 
panic which followed the bank revelations and 
the fall of the house of Smith & Buchanan. 
He says: 

"It was a day of mourning for Baltimore. Since 
18 12 no city in the Union had appeared more stead- 
ily prosperous, and now the vain mask was dropped. 
Debtors, honest and dishonest, were sued and their 
property attached. The notes discounted on pledge 
of the stock, a security now so greatly sunk in value, 
were called in upon partial payments. Local banks 
were pressed to take up their accumulated paper. 
The policy of honest retrenchment was vigorously 
pursued. Following the panic created at Baltimore, 
a run was commenced upon the State banks in our 
middle, southern and western sections, the United 



Maryland in National Politics. 109 

States Bank, at the same time, demanding the pay- 
ment of balances. A legion of these banks, mostly 
those of the newly settled towns, stopped payment 
in the summer, leaving their repudiated paper to 
float while it might among the simple and credulous, 
passing from one hand to the other. Insolvency 
notices filled the advertising columns of the news- 
papers. Merchants met in mass-meetings to me- 
morialize Congress or to devise their own remedies 
for the crisis." 

This panic, which unhappily involved the 
name of General Smith, was the severest blow 
he ever received. He had for twenty years 
been either in the House or Senate, and had 
not during that time given personal attention 
to the business of his firm. When the crash 
came, therefore, he lost all he had, except 
honor. He was not held responsible by 
thoughtful people for the collapse of his house 
or for the panic which ensued, but for a time 
his name was beclouded along with that of his 
unworthy partner. For a time it seemed that 
his State would retire the old veteran to pri- 
vate life, but upon sober consideration of all 
the facts in the branch bank scandal the people 
reconsidered and returned Smith to the Senate. 

The bank question seemed to pursue Gen- 
eral Smith, however. He had stood against re- 
chartering it in 1811, and he had sustained 
ruinous losses in the Baltimore branch bank 
panic in 1819. But he was not through with 



no Maryland in National Politics. 

it. The institution remained an issue as long 
as he remained in public life and, for that 
matter, for many years afterward. In 1830 
the matter came forward tempestuously, when 
President Jackson's opposition to the bank was 
boldly announced. The Executive had sent a 
message to Congress outlining his reasons for 
opposing another recharter. By this time 
General Smith had become chairman of the 
powerful Senate Committee on Finance, and 
this message was referred to that body. In 
spite of all the reverses which he had sustained 
at the hands of the bank, including the dismis- 
sal of his brother from Madison's Cabinet and 
his own personal losses, the old General re- 
ported to the Senate in favor of giving the in- 
stitution another lease of life. 

One of the most important pieces of con- 
structive work done by General Smith came 
late in life, when he in 1829 fathered the plan 
whereby the United States recovered its right 
to trade with the British West Indies. 
"The recovery of this trade," says Benton in 
his "Thirty Years' View," "had been a large 
object with the American government from 
the time of its establishment. As British colo- 
nies, we enjoyed it before the Revolution; as 
revolted colonies, we lost it; and as an inde- 
pendent nation we sought to obtain it again. 



Maryland in National Politics, in 

We did regain it, and the one thing which con- 
tributed to this good result was the Act of 
Congress of May 29th, of which General 
Samuel Smith, Senator from Maryland, was 
the chief promoter, and by which the Presi- 
dent was authorized, on the adoption of cer- 
tain measures by Great Britain, to open the 
ports of the United States to her vessels on 
reciprocal terms." 

General Smith remained in the United 
States Senate until that branch of Congress 
reached the zenith of its glory. He was 
Maryland's honored Senator in the "Augustan 
Age" of this the greatest of all deliberative 
bodies. Daniel Webster thundered there. 
Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun were in 
their prime. Theodore Frelinghuysen, Wil- 
liam L. Marcy, Silas Wright, George M. Dal- 
las, John Forsythe, Thomas H. Benton and 
Thomas Ewing were there. The brilliant 
Robert Y. Hayne, Hugh L. White and Felix 
Grundy had appeared upon the national 
stage. Littleton W. Tazewell and John Tyler 
and Samuel Prentiss, and William Pinkney 
and Rufus King were General Smith's con- 
temporaries. It was indeed a Senate of giants, 
and to have been twice elected to preside over 
these men was a distinction worthy of any 
Marylander of any time. 



112 Maryland in National Politics. 

WILLIAM PINKNEY 

1764 — 1822 

In all American history there is perhaps no 
political career that furnishes a parallel to 
that of William Pinkney, legislator, diplomat- 
ist, soldier, statesman, orator and advocate. 
His was a career amazing in the diversity of 
public services rendered, and more amazing 
in the facility with which he met every re- 
sposibility, whether engaged in missions 
abroad or whether holding commissions at 
home. A mere summary of the achievements 
of this Marylander is enough to arouse the 
wonder of any student of biography. 

This epitome shows that Pinkney was a 
member of the Maryland convention that rati- 
fied the Federal Constitution; twice a mem- 
ber of the Maryland House of Delegates ; once 
a member of the State Senate; twice a Repre- 
sentative in Congress, with an interim of 26 
years; a member of the Maryland Executive 
Council; Attorney-General of his State; a 
Commissioner to London under the Jay Trea- 
ty; Joint Minister to the Court of St. James; 
Minister to the same court; Minister to the 
two Sicilies; Minister to Russia; Attorney- 



Maryland in National Politics. 113 

General of the United States and a member of 
the United States Senate. In addition to this, 
he was a soldier in the army during the War 
of 1 81 2 and was wounded at the battle of Bla- 
densburg. 

Such a record of devotion to public affairs 
is difficult to comprehend. It hardly seems 
possible that so much could be crowded into 
the lifetime of a single man or that a State or 
nation would or could exact so much of one 
of its sons. But it must be remembered that 
Pinkney lived in a period when the govern- 
ment, new and untried, needed the services 
and support of every man of superior talents 
within its borders. And this Marylander 
cheerfully gave all that he had of brains and 
time and accomplishments, first to his State 
and then to the whole country. 

Of all his activities, however, none were so 
vital to all the American people as were his 
supreme efforts as the diplomatic representa- 
tive of his government in London, to prevent 
a second war with Great Britain. First, as 
coadjutor of Monroe, and afterward, single- 
handed, he negotiated desperately to compose 
the differences between the two countries. He 
struggled in season and out with an obstinate 
and arrogant British ministry in the hope of 
safeguarding by solemn treaty American rights 



114 Maryland in National Politics. 

upon the seas. He demanded only decent 
treatment of his country's commerce and only 
an honest recognition of his country's right to 
live and have its being in the family of na- 
tions. 

With fateful blindness, however, the Brit- 
ish Throne refused to yield either to Pinkney's 
appeals or to his remonstrances. The out- 
rages against our ships and our seamen con- 
tinued. Only the argument of gunpowder 
could influence these Englishmen. This court 
of last resort was invoked, when Pinkney's 
peaceful mission finally failed, and for the sec- 
ond time in a single generation America was 
forced to draw the sword against the most 
powerful kingdom of its time. 



Long before Pinkney was dispatched to 
London with plenipotentiary powers from this 
government he had become a conspicuous fig- 
ure in American public life. He had assumed 
rank with the leading orators of his day. He 
had won splendid success at the bar and had 
distinguished himself as a diplomatist. He 
had served in legislative bodies in both the 
State and nation, and was often pointed to as 
the worthy successor in national councils of 



Maryland in National Politics. 115 

such Marylanders as Carroll, Hanson, Chase 
and Martin. 

At the age of twenty-four Pinkney made 
his initial appearance as a public servant when 
he sat as a delegate in the Marylnd conven- 
tion called to ratify the Federal Constitution. 
The next two years were spent in the State 
House of Delegates, and at the age of 27 he 
was elected as a Representative from Mary- 
land in the Second Congress. Almost imme- 
diately, however, he resigned his seat when 
the question of his eligibility was raised. This 
question, it seems, involved his residence in 
Maryland at the time of the election, but the 
details of it have not been made clear in the 
official biographies. After serving upon the 
Executive Council of Maryland for three 
years, he was a second time elected to the 
House of Delegates in 1795. 

Pinkney's first mission abroad was dated a 
year later. He was appointed by President 
Washington a Commissioner at London under 
the Jay Treaty, and resigned his seat in the 
Maryland legislature forthwith. This was a 
highly important assignment. It involved 
primarily the settlement of British claims 
against the United States arising out of Revo- 
lutionary War confiscations, and was a part of 
the general program conceived by President 



ii6 Maryland in National Politics. 

Washington for the maintenance of peace with 
England. 

John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the 
United States Supreme Court, had in 1794 
been sent to London as an envoy extraordi- 
nary, empowered to negotiate a treaty under 
the terms of which the President hoped to ad- 
just the complications which followed the re- 
peated attempts on the part of the British gov- 
ernment to drive American commerce off the 
seas. Great Britain was at war with France, 
as was Spain, Austria, Russia and Prussia a lit- 
tle later. The French revolution had been 
raging for years, and out of it had come the 
French republic. In the combined effort by 
European monarchies to crush republicanism 
on the Continent, England had undertaken the 
duty of blockading the French coast. And it 
was under such a pretext that the maritime in- 
terests of the United States had been preyed 
upon, American seamen impressed and Amer- 
ican trade with neutral as well as belligerent 
countries practically paralyzed. 

These were some of the grievances that the 
Jay Treaty was designed to remedy. Such a 
convention was finally concluded, forwarded 
to the United States and, though unpopular in 
the extreme, it was ratified by the Senate. Un- 
der it the American government agreed to 



Maryland in National Politics. 117 

compensate Great Britain "for the confiscated 
debts of the Revolution, so far as 'lawful im- 
pediments since peace' might have prevented 
their collection. On the other hand, Great 
Britain promised indemnity to American citi- 
zens for the unlawful captures recently made 
of American vessels. Finally the United States 
should recompense or make restitution in re- 
spect to the Genet captures of 1793 by priva- 
teers fitted out in our ports." 

The determination of the amounts of money 
which the British on the one hand and the 
Americans on the other, were to receive un- 
der the stipulations of this treaty, devolved 
upon William Pinkney and his colleagues on 
the American Commission to London. For 
eight years the Marylander remained in the 
British capital, and while the awards of the 
body of which he was a member do not occupy 
a conspicuous place in history, the experience 
gained in these negotiations and the confi- 
dences won while abroad eminently fitted this 
rising young diplomat for the infinitely great- 
er service which he rendered his country a few 
years afterward. He came home to become 
Attorney-General of his State in 1805, but re- 
tired from that office a year later, when Presi- 
dent Jefferson made him Joint Minister to 
Great Britain with James Monroe. 



ii8 Maryland in National Politics. 

Meanwhile the stormy administration of 
John Adams had passed into history. War 
with France had been threatened as a result of 
the Jay Treaty. The French people had re- 
sented the pact as an affront from a nation 
that owed its existence to French intervention. 
French men-of-war were sent out to harass 
American commerce. The American Ambas- 
sador at Paris had been insulted and ordered 
out of the country. Three special envoys — 
John Marshall, Elbridge Gerry and Charles 
Pinckney — had been sent to France to seek 
peace, but were met at once with demands for 
bribes and returned without opening formal 
negotiations. America armed itself for war 
and was preparing to fight, when France re- 
lented and signed the Treaty of 1800, whereby 
peaceful relations between the two countries 
were again restored. 

America's foreign relations, however, did 
not improve with the ratification of the 
French treaty, nor even with the conclusion of 
a more favorable convention with Spain. On 
the contrary, troubles multiplied. Great Brit- 
ain, disregarding the spirit, if not the letter, of 
the Jay Treaty, renewed its depredations upon 
American shipping, and strained relations be- 
tween England and the United States again 
existed. This was the situation when Thomas 



Maryland in National Politics. 119 

Jefferson became President in the first year of 
the nineteenth century. 

James Monroe, who had been Minister to 
Spain, then Minister to France, had by this 
time been transferred to the London Legation. 
He had been ineffectively negotiating with 
the British Ministry for relief from assaults 
which American commerce suffered at the 
hands of British men-of-war. Pitt had in 1805 
held out some encouragement to Monroe for 
a peaceful arrangement, but a little later he 
died, and Jefferson, alarmed over the probable 
attitude of the new ministry, decided to send 
William Pinkney to join Monroe at London. 

This act on Jefferson's part greatly chargin- 
ned Monroe and, incidentally, figured largely 
in the Democratic politics of the next few 
years. Jefferson had picked James Madison 
to succeed him as President, though Monroe 
was openly ambitious to be Jefferson's official 
heir. John Randolph, meanwhile, had broken 
with Jefferson, and a strong movement had 
been organized by Randolph to nominate 
Monroe instead of Madison for the Presiden- 
cy. The appointment of Pinkney, a Federal- 
ist, for the purpose, as alleged, of humiliating 
Monroe, was made an issue of. Monroe found 
it expedient, however, to remain at his post, 
and the plan of defeating Madison was, for a 



120 Maryland in National Politics. 

time, abandoned. That Jefferson expected 
Monroe's resentment at the designation of the 
Marylander as Joint Minister, is indicated by 
a line in the letter written by the President to 
the Minister. "Pinkney," wrote Jefferson, 
"will be authorized to take your place when- 
ever you think yourself obliged to return." 

Pinkney's selection as Joint Minister to Lon- 
don gave him a rare opportunity to make for 
himself an honored place in American his- 
tory. Schouler, the historian, says that "with 
Pinkney's polished manners and conservative 
views, he was a most acceptable American to 
British court circles." Jefferson believed that 
if any man in America could restrain the Brit- 
ish, could make that nation see the justice of 
American rights upon the sea, and that the 
only favor we asked was the privilege of being 
left alone, that man was William Pinkney. 
The President believed that Monroe would 
soon ask for his recall, which circumstance 
would, of course, leave in Pinkney's hands the 
full responsibility of deferring, if not actually 
preventing war. 

Just how near we were to war with England 
when Jefferson found it necessary to dispatch 
Pinkney to London, may be indicated by the 
outraged feelings of the President himself. 
He bitterly resented the lawless attitude of 



Maryland in National Politics. 121 

Great Britain toward American commerce, 
and in his message to Congress in 1805 he 
said: 

"Our coasts have been infested and our harbors 
watched by private armed vessels, some of these 
without commissions, some with legal commissions, 
but committing piratical acts beyond the authority 
of their commissions. They have captured in the 
very entrance of our harbors, as well as on the high 
seas, not only the vessels of our friends coming to 
trade with us, but also our own. They have carried 
them off under the pretense of legal adjudicure, but 
not daring to affront a court of justice. They have 
plundered and sunk them by the way, maltreating the 
crews and abandoning in boats in the open sea and 
on desert shores without food or covering." 

This is indicative of the state of relations 
between America and Great Britain when 
Pinkney a year later arrived in London. As 
soon, however, as he joined Monroe the two 
Americans invited negotiations for a new 
treaty. Lords Holland and Auckland respond- 
ed favorably, and for more than three months 
the two envoys bargained with the English- 
men for a pact that would secure American 
neutral rights and outlaw reprisals, privateer- 
ing and general discriminations against 
American commerce. Pinkney and Monroe 
held out obstinately for an article that would 
prohibit the impressment of seamen, but this 
proposal was rejected, assurance being given. 



122 Maryland in National Politics. 

however, that officers who impressed subjects 
of a neutral nation would be punished. 

A treaty was finally concluded late in the 
year, and though it did not carry into effect 
the instructions given the two envoys, particu- 
larly upon the question of impressment, the 
instrument was signed and forwarded to the 
President. Just before this act was accom- 
plished, however. Napoleon, hoping to inter- 
fere with the negotiations, issued his famous 
Berlin decree, declaring the British Isles in a 
state of blockade and prohibiting all com- 
merce with them by neutral nations. He fur- 
ther prohibited the admission into any French 
port of vessels that had first visited England. 
This had the immediate effect of a demand by 
the British Ministry that the United States re- 
sist the French aggressions, with a reservation 
on the Ministry's part to retaliate against 
France. Until these terms were agreed to 
Holland and Auckland refused to sign the 
treaty. Pinkney and Monroe declined to agree 
to these new terms. The British then yielded, 
but with express reservations. 

This treaty was instantly condemned by the 
President and his friends in Washington, be- 
cause of its failure to contain any stipulation 
against the seizure of American seamen. The 
two negotiators were commended for their ef- 



Maryland in National Politics. 123 

forts, though their first joint attempt to settle 
the vital dififerences between the two countries 
failed. The convention was sent back to Lon- 
don "as a sort of project which all parties had 
submitted with the knowledge that it did not 
embody official instructions." 

With the Decree of Berlin and the British 
Orders in Council, the latter having been pro- 
mulgated first, now in effect, the warring na- 
tions of Europe sought to establish paper 
blockades against all neutral trade with any 
of the belligerent nations. The British order 
forbade trade between the United States and 
any European port from which the British 
were excluded. Napoleon's decree announced 
that any ship was a good prize that should sail 
for or from any British port. And in the en- 
forcement of this outrageous warfare against 
neutral shipping history has repeated itself in 
the situation obtaining in Europe today. In 
the present conflict Germany has declared the 
existence of a "war zone" around the British 
Isles. England, as a measure of reprisal, has 
declared all foodstuffs destined to Germany 
contraband and subject to seizure and confis- 
cation. 

The only difference in the two situations 
lies in the fact that both France and Eng- 
land in 1807 formally declared a "blockade" 



124 Maryland in National Politics. 

against the ports of the other, a measure, by 
the way, which neither could effectively en- 
force, whereas in the present instance neither 
Germany nor England has undertaken to es- 
tablish a blockade as recognized by interna- 
tional law. Each of them has sought to gain 
the advantages of one without assuming the 
responsibility of such action. 

At all events, the two blockades of 1807, 
which were subsequently reinforced by Na- 
poleon's Milan Decree, were intended to com- 
pletely destroy neutral commerce. And as 
America was the only maritime nation of con- 
sequence at that time not at war — as she is the 
only great commercial nation today at peace — 
her interests were those which suffered most. 
This condition, coupled with Jefferson's fer- 
vent hope of escaping the delirium of war 
into which Europe had been plunged, led to a 
reopening of negotiations in London for a 
peaceful understanding. 

Important administrative changes hadmean- 
while taken place in England. The Fox-Gren- 
ville Ministry, which had come into power up- 
on the deathof the younger Pitt,passed outwith 
the untimely death of Fox. George Canning, 
who has been described as a man of 'Vigorous 
mind, but set as a bulldog and satirical in his 
dislikes," became head of the Foreign Office. 



Maryland in National Politics. 125 

Canning was far less friendly to the United 
States than had been Holland and Auckland, 
yet Pinkney and Monroe called upon the new 
Minister. Canning refused at first to proceed 
with the interview, saying that the Jefiferson 
administration had rejected the former treaty 
and "that the relations of the two countries 
were made most embarrassing." 

Canning later reconsidered to the extent of 
accepting overtures from the American en- 
voys and gave some slight indication of yield- 
ing in a measure to the advances of the two 
Americans. Before this intercourse could pro- 
ceed to the point of considering terms, how- 
ever, diplomatic transactions came to a sudden 
halt. A British sloop had defied the authori- 
ties at Charleston, S. C, and had fired a shot 
over the town when ordered to leave the port. 
Before the excitement over this had subsided 
the English two-decker Leopard overhauled 
and fired a broadside into the Americancruiser 
Chesapeake off the Virginia Capes in an ef- 
fort to take from the American vessel three al- 
leged deserters from the British navy. Obvi- 
ously, negotiations paused while America de- 
liberated upon these outrages. 

About this time the opposition to the elec- 
tion of Madison as Jefferson's successor be- 
came again active, and Monroe, upon whom 



126 Maryland in National Politics. 

this opposition centered, asked for his recall. 
The President, accordingly, in the fall of 1807 
directed Monroe to return to Washington, 
leaving William Pinkney alone in London to 
carry the whole burden of preserving such re- 
lations between the United States and Great 
Britain as might still leave the way open for 
adjustments. 

Congress had been convened at home and 
the Embargo Act was passed as a measure of 
retaliation, not only for the murderous assault 
upon the Chesapeake, but as an answer to the 
increasing menace to neutral commerce under 
the various blockade decrees. This prohib 
ited American vessels from trading with any 
foreign port, neutral or belligerent. This law, 
it was later found, inflicted great injury upon 
domestic interests and very little upon Great 
Britain. It was, therefore, repealed fourteen 
months after enactment, and in its place the 
Non-intercourse Act was passed. This pro- 
hibited Americans from trading with England 
or France, but not with other nations. 

With the Non-intercourse Act as a weapon, 
Pinkney for a third time sought to move the 
British Cabinet. An ofifer was made by him, 
at the suggestion of the President, that this act 
would not be enforced against England if that 
country would modify its attitude toward 



Maryland in National Politics. 127 

American commerce. Canning arrogantly re- 
jected this proposal, asserting that the embar- 
go had demonstrated that England was not, 
after all, dependent upon the trade of Amer- 
ica. More than that, however, it is evident 
that Canning believed that the financial dis- 
tress in the Untied States would force Jeffer- 
son to lift the embargo whether or not terms 
were made with Britain. 

This was the status of affairs when Jefferson 
retired from the Presidency in 1801, to be suc- 
ceeded by Madison. Early in the new admin- 
istration Napoleon, as shrewd as a diplomat as 
he was daring as a soldier, affected to with- 
draw the Berlin and Milan decrees, and in a 
letter issued through the Duke of Cadore an- 
nounced their revocation. This seemed to re- 
store friendly relations between the United 
States and France, but more important than 
that, it gave the Madison administration an- 
other opportunity to reopen negotiations with 
Great Britain to the same end. The Non- 
intercourse Act, in so far as it applied to 
France, was thereupon suspended, and, armed 
with Cadore's letter, Pinkney renewed his 
struggle with the British Cabinet for a change 
of policy toward the American government. 

Again, however, the Ministry had changed. 
Canning had fought a duel with Lord Castle- 



128 Maryland in National Politics. 

reagh and had been driven out of office. The 
Marquis of Wellesley had succeeded to the 
Foreign Office portfolio. In this connection 
Madison hopefully wrote to Pinkney: "Should 
a change in the composition or calculations of 
the Cabinet give a favorable turn to its policy 
toward this country, it is desirable that no time 
be lost in allowing it its effect." This in mind, 
Pinkney approached Wellesley with a pro- 
posal that England follow Napoleon's lead 
and revoke the British orders. 

For weeks and months Pinkney labored to 
effect a conciliatory attitude on the part of 
Great Britain toward the United States. After 
many fruitless interviews, however, he learned 
that under no existing circumstances would 
the Orders in Council be recalled. This last 
effort failing and realizing finally that soon 
or late this country would have to fight for 
what it could not secure by peaceable means, 
Pinkney in 1811 left London in disgust and 
returned to the United States. 

For five long years Pinkney labored vainly 
but determinedly to change the insolent policy 
of Great Britain toward the United States. 
He offered every concession that could be hon- 
orably made. He proposed every possible 
compromise and urged every consideration 
that could be made the basis of a negotiation. 



Maryland in National Politics. 129 

But his task was a hopeless one from the start. 
England, smarting still over the Revolution- 
ary War, would not yield until another war 
had come and another defeat had been inflict- 
ed upon her by the new republic. But blame 
for the inevitable was not Pinkney's reward. 
Instead he was, after a few months' service in 
the Maryland State Senate, invited to become 
Attorney-General of the United States in the 
reformed Madison Cabinet. 

Early in January, 191 2, Pinkney entered 
Madison's official family and served as Attor- 
ney-General for a little more than two years. 
He was, therefore, the President's legal ad- 
viser during the greater part of the War of 
181 2. Pinkney had become the foremost ad- 
vocate at the American bar and, feeling that 
the time had come when he should give some 
attention to his private practice, he left Wash- 
ington and returned to Baltimore in February, 
1914. 

In August of the same year, however, this 
great Marylander again entered the public 
service, when he was elected a member of the 
Fourteenth Congress, a body from which he 
had resigned 26 years before. An incident of 
his two-year term in the House has been re- 
cited by a contemporary. "Mr. Pinkney," 
says this writer, "came into the House with a 



130 Maryland in National Politics. 

national reputation, in the fullness of his fame 
and exciting a great expectation. He spoke 
on the treaty-making power, a question of dip- 
lomatic and constitutional law, and having 
been minister to half the courts of Europe, 
Attorney-General of the United States and a 
jurist by profession, could only speak in one 
way — as a great master of the subject; and, 
consequently, appeared as if instructing the 
House. John Randolph, a veteran of 20 years 
parliamentary service, thought a new member 
should serve a little apprenticeship before he 
became an instructor, and wished to signify 
that to Mr. Pinkney. He had a gift such as 
man never had, at delicate intimation, where 
he desired to give a hint without ofifence, and 
he displayed it on this occasion. He replied 
to Mr. Pinkney, referring to him by the par- 
liamentary designation of 'the member from 
Maryland,' and then pausing, as if not quite 
certain, added, 'I believe he is from Mary- 
land.' The implied doubt as to where he 
came from, and consequently as to who he was, 
amused Mr. Pinkney, who understood it per- 
fectly, went over to Mr. Randolph's seat, in- 
troduced himself and assured the Virginian 
that he was 'from Maryland.' " 

Pinkney went on two other missions abroad. 
He resigned his seat in the House to become 



Maryland in National Politics. 131 

Minister to the two Sicilies, and a little later 
served two years as Minister to Russia. Re- 
turning to Maryland in 181 8, he was elected 
to the United States Senate to succeed Alexan- 
der C. Hanson, remaining in that body until 
he died in 1822. It was as an orator rather 
than as a diplomat that he was best known to 
his contemporaries, but it was his service in 
diplomatic fields that he gave to the nation the 
best years and fruits of his life. Thomas H. 
Benton, with whom Pinkney served in the 
Senate, recognized in the Marylander the 
greatest orator of his day, as is eloquently in- 
dicated in the following tribute from Benton's 
"Thirty Years in the United States Senate": 

''William Pinkney was considered in his day the 
first of American orators, but will hardly keep that 
place with posterity, because he spoke more to the 
hearer than the reader — to the present than to the 
absent. He labored his speeches hard, but it was 
for the effect of their delivery and the triumph of 
present victory. He loved the admiration of the 
crowded gallery; the trumpet-tonged fame which 
went forth from the forum ; the victory which 
crowned the efforts; but avoided the publication of 
what was received with so much applause, giving as 
a reason that the published speech would not sustain 
the renown of the delivered one. His forte as a 
speaker lay in his judgment, his logic, his power of 
argument, but, like many other men of acknowledged 
pre-eminence in some gift of nature, he courted his 



132 Maryland in National Politics. 

imagination too much and laid too much stress upon 
action and dehvery. 

"Pinkney's last speech in the Senate, "Benton con- 
tinues, "was in reply to Rufus King, on the Mis- 
souri question, and was the master effort of his life. 
The subject, the place, the audience, the antagonist, 
were all such as to excite him to the utmost exertion. 
The subject was a national controversy convulsing 
the Union and menacing it with dissolution; the 
place was the American Senate; the audience was 
Europe and America; the antagonist was Princeps 
Senatus, illustrious for thirty years of diplomatic 
and senatorial service and for great dignity of life 
and character. And Pinkney's was a dazzling and 
overpowering reply, with the prestige of having the 
Union and harmony of the States for its object, and 
crowded with rich material. The most brilliant 
part of it was a highly wrought and splendid amplifi- 
cation (with illustrations from Greek and Roman 
history) of that passage of Burke's speech upon 
'Conciliation with the Colonies,' in which, looking to 
the elements of American resistence to British power, 
Burke looked to the spirit of the slave-holding colo- 
nies as a main ingredient, and attributes to the mas- 
ters of slaves, who are not themselves slaves, the 
highest love of liberty and the most difficult task of 
subjection. It was the most gorgeous speech ever 
delivered in the Senate, and the most applauded ; but 
it was only a magnificent exhibition, as Mr. Pinkney 
knew it would not sustain in the reading the plaudits 
it received in delivery; therefore, he avoided its pub- 
lication." 

As a lawyer William Pinkney had few peers 
at the Maryland bar or at the bar of any other 
State. In him was found that rare combina- 
tion of brilliancy and absolute precision in the 



Maryland in National Politics. 133 

presentation of a case, whether to a court or to 
a jury. This review of Pinkney's public serv- 
ices is designed to outline his achievements in 
a broad, national sense, but it would be totally 
incomplete without a recognition of his superb 
skill and profound learning as a practitioner 
of the law. 

Of Pinkney's power as an advocate and a 
lawyer, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in his 
autobiography, says : 

"I have heard almost all the great advocates of 
the United States, both of the past and present gen- 
eration, but I have seen none equal to Pinkney. He 
was a profound lawyer in every department of the 
science, as well as a powerful and eloquent debater. 
He always saw the strongest point in his case, and 
he put forth his whole strength to support it and 
enforce it by analogies from other branches of the 
law. He never withdrew the attention of the Court 
from his point by associating with it more question- 
able propositions obviously untenable. He seemed 
to regard such arguments as evidence of a want of 
legal knowledge in the speaker." 



134 Maryland in National Politics. 



WILLIAM WIRT 

1872— 1834 

It is an historic circumstance that the "bor- 
der" States of the Union, that is, the group of 
Commonwealths occupying a sort of neutral 
position between the North and the South, 
have not been producers of Presidents. They 
have contributed handsomely in other direc- 
tions to the statesmanship of the country, but 
not one of them ever sent a son to the White 
House. 

In the earlier days of the Republic the 
South, as a section, was prolific of Presidents. 
Six Virginians, three Tennesseeans and one 
Louisianan were elevated to that high office. 
Since the Civil War, no Southerner has at- 
tained the Presidency, and but few have as- 
pired to it. William Henry Harrison, Abra- 
ham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson were born 
south of the Ohio River, but they were nomi- 
nated and elected as men of the North. 

The extraordinary fact remains, however, 
that the borderland, extending from Mary- 
land to Missouri, has never enjoyed the honor 
of furnishing the nation with an executive 
head. Kentucky offered her Clay and her 
Breckinridge; Missouri tried to nominate 



Maryland in National Politics. 135 

Benton, Bland and Clark; West Virginia has 
come no nearer the mark than one candidate 
for the Vice-Presidency, and Maryland, in 
all our national history, has presented but two 
Presidential aspirants to the country. 

This distinction was reserved for William 
Wirt and Joshua Levering. In 1832 Wirt 
headed the Anti-Masonic ticket against Jack- 
son and Clay and, though he received the elec- 
toral vote of but one State, the movement 
which he championed created a new and burn- 
ing party issue; shattered for a time the ranks 
of the old political organizations and forever 
destroyed Henry Clay's hope of reaching the 
goal of his cherished ambitions. 

But few popular impulses during our career 
as a nation have so profoundly stirred the peo- 
ple as did that widespread agitation against 
Free Masonry. It was one of those rare yet 
remarkable phenomena in our politics which, 
"like a comet spacing the sky, betoken some 
mighty convulsion, then disappears to falsify 
and be forgotten." Such was the fate of the 
one-idea propaganda to which Wirt lent his 
name and the weight of his great influence. 

Wirt's nomination and defeat for the Presi- 
dency was the climax of his singularly notable 
career as a lawyer, a statesman and an author. 
A native Marylander, an adopted Virginian, 



136 Maryland in National Politics. 

then a Marylander once more, he figured con- 
spicuously for nearly forty years in the pro- 
fessional and political annals of two States and 
the nation. He first came into national promi- 
nence when he led the prosecution of Aaron 
Burr, charged with the crime of high treason, 
and delivered, during the course of that 
famous trial, a speech that yet has rank among 
the greatest masterpieces of forensic oratory 
in the field of American jurisprudence. 

From the Virginia bar Wirt was appointed 
Attorney-General of the United States. He 
served for twelve consecutive years as chief 
counsel for the government, a greater period 
than any man has ever occupied that office, 
and much longer than any man ever sat con- 
tinuously in a Presidential Cabinet, with the 
one exception of James Wilson. 

Following his long term of public service, 
extending over three administrations, a term 
marked by participation in some of the most 
important litigation ever argued before the 
United States Supreme Court, Wirt again 
turned to the State of his birth to spend his 
last years upon her soil. 



Unlike most young men then, as now, who 
at an early age are thrown upon their own re- 
sources, William Wirt met but few of the re- 



Maryland in National Politics. 137 

verses common to such a beginning. Though 
an orphan at eight and without inheritance, he 
seems to have found success awaiting him at 
every turn. Precocious as a child, handsome 
and brilliant as a youth, he attracted men to 
him easily and held them firmly. This was 
characterictic of his school days, and even 
more marked when, in 1792, he opened a law 
office in Culpepper Court House, Virginia. 

The same charming personality endeared 
Wirt to friends of high and low degree when 
he moved to Charlottesville, where he first met 
Jefiferson and Monroe; when he went to Rich- 
mond to be Clerk of the House of Delegates, 
and Chancellor of the Eastern District; when 
he went to Norfolk to practice law, and when 
he returned to Richmond to rejoin the bar 
of that city. Business seemed to come natural- 
ly to him, and successes to follow just as natur- 
ally. His was indeed a remarkable beginning, 
free as it was from the more pronounced fail- 
ures, the disappointments and the heart-break- 
ing toil through which most men of eminence 
reach their high station. 

This is not to say that William Wirt was a 
prodigy as a man or as a lawyer. He was 
neither. Yet his mind was so all-absorbing, 
so eager and so responsive that he acquired 
learning readily, and imparted it with equal 



138 Maryland in National Politics. 

facility. At thirty he was an author, his vol- 
ume, "Letters of a British Spy," having ap- 
peared. Less than five years later his essays, 
collected under title of "The Rainbow," were 
published. In two more years, "The Old 
Bachelor," in two volumes, was finished and 
Wirt's incomparable biography of Patrick 
Henry under way. 

From early youth literary enterprise had 
been Wirt's cherished ambition. If this had 
been profitable we might never have heard of 
the legal attainments of this man. It did not 
pay, however, and the law ultimately became 
the ruling passion of his life. His practice 
was promising from the beginning, but it did 
not assume other than local character until 
Wirt had taken part in the sensational trial of 
Aaron Burr. 

This young man had barely reached the age 
of 33 when President Jefiferson, impressed 
with his great ability, retained Wirt to aid 
Attorney-General Caesar Rodney and District 
Attorney Hay in prosecuting Burr before the 
Federal Court for the District of Virginia, 
and with this conspirator, his associates, Her- 
man Blennerhassett, Jonathan Dayton, John 
Smith, Comfort Tyler, Israel Smith and David 
Floyd. This trial gave William Wirt an op- 
portunity that comes to but few lawyers, great 



Maryland in National Politics. 139 

or near-great. And American court history 
records no greater personal triumph than the 
conduct of Wirt upon this memorable occa- 
sion. 

The story of Burr's mad attempt to disrupt 
the Union and to establish an empire below the 
Rio Grande; of his exposure and his arrest; 
of his arraignment before a court over which 
Chief Justice Marshall presided; of his in- 
dictment for high treason by a grand jury 
headed by John Randolph of Roanoke; of the 
long and bitter contest of opposing counsel, 
and finally of Burr's acquittal, in spite of Jef- 
ferson's determination to hang him — this story 
is told in the sketch of Luther Martin, pub- 
lished in this volume. 

Future generations may have lost sight of 
the details of this notorious effort to dismem- 
ber the Union, and may have lost interest in the 
dramatic proceedings against the arch-con- 
spirator, but time has failed to obscure the 
fame of William Wirt's masterly argument 
against Burr in this case. It was a speech of 
four hours' duration, passages of which 
rivaled the "exuberance of thought and the 
splendor of diction" which marked the charge 
of Edmund Burke against Warren Hastings. 
It was Wirt's noblest efifort as an orator, and 
when he pictured Blennerhassett's island as an 



140 Maryland in National Politics. 

Eden, with Burr as its tempter, the little court- 
room audience yielded to uncontrollable emo- 
tion. Even the stern Chief Justice seemed 
spellbound and the defendant recoiled as 
though touched by fire. This part of Wirt's 
speech is worthy of preservation for all time. 
It is as follows : 

"Who is Blennerhassett? A native of Ireland, a 
man of letters who fled from the storm of his own 
country to find quiet in ours. His history shows that 
war is not the natural element of his mind. If it 
had been, he would never have exchanged Ireland 
for America. So far as an army from furnishing 
the society natural and proper to Mr. Blennerhas- 
sett's character, that on his arrival in America he 
retired even from the population of the Atlantic 
States, and sought quiet and solitude in the bosom 
of our western forests. But he carried with him 
taste and science and wealth; and lo, the desert 
smiled! Possessing himself of a beautiful island in 
the Ohio, he erects upon it a palace, and decorates it 
with every romantic embellishment of fancy. A 
shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied blooms 
around him. Music that might have charmed 
Calypso and her nymphs is his. An extensive li- 
brary spreads its treasurers before him. A philo- 
sophical apparatus offers to him all the secrets and 
mysteries of nature. Peace, tranquillity and inno- 
cence shed their mingled delights around him. And 
to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who 
is said to be lovely even beyond her sex, and graced 
with every accomplishment, had blessed him with 
her love and made him the father of several children. 
The evidence would convince you that this is but a 
faint picture of the real life. In the midst of all this 



Maryland in National Politics. 141 

peace, this innocent simplicity, this tranquillity, this 
feast of the mind, this pure banquet of the heart, the 
destroyer comes; he comes to change this paradise 
into a hell. Yet the flowers do not wither at his ap- 
proach. No monitory shudderings through the 
bosom of their unfortunate possessor warn him of 
the ruin that is coming upon him. A stranger pre- 
sents himself. Introduced to their civilities by the 
high rank which he had lately held in his country, he 
soon finds his way to the heart by his dignity and by 
the elegance of his demeanor, the light and beauty of 
his conversation, and the seductive and fascinating 
power of his address. The conquest was not diffi- 
cult. Innocence is ever simple and credulous. Con- 
scious of no design itself, it suspects none in others. 
It wears no guard before its breast. Every door 
and portal and avenue of the heart is thrown open 
and all who chose it enter. Such was the state of 
Eden when the serpent entered its bowers. The 
prisoner, in a more engaging form, winding himself 
into the open and unpracticed heart of the unfortu- 
nate Blennerhassett, found but little difficulty in 
changing the native character of that heart and the 
objects of its affection. By degrees he infuses into 
it the poison of his own ambitions. He breathes 
into it the fire of his own courage; a daring and des- 
perate thirst for glory; an ardorpantingfor great en- 
terprises, for all the storm and bustle and hurricane 
of life. In a short time the whole man is changed, and 
every object of his former delight is relinquished. 
No more he enjoys the tranquil scene; it has become 
flat and insipid to his taste. His books are aban- 
doned. His retort and crucible are thrown aside. 
His shrubbery blows and breathes its fragrance 
upon the air in vain; he likes it not. His ear no 
longer drinks the rich melody of music; it longs for 
the trumpets clangor and the cannon's roar. Even 



142 Maryland in National Politics. 

the prattle of his babes, once so sweet, no longer 
affects him; and the angel smile of his wife, which 
hitherto touched his bosom with ecstacies so unspeak- 
able, is now unseen and unfelt. Greater objects 
have taken possession of his soul. His imagination 
has been dazzled by visions of diadems, of stars and 
garters and titles of nobility. He has been taught 
to burn with restless emulation at the names of great 
heroes and conquerors. His enchanted island is 
destined soon to relapse into a wilderness ; and in a 
few months we find the beautiful and tender partner 
of his bosom, whom he lately 'permitted no winds 
of summer to visit too roughly,' we find her shiver- 
ing at midnight upon the wintry banks of the Ohio, 
mingling her tears with the torrents, that froze as 
they fell. Yet this unfortunate man, thus deluded 
from his interest and his happiness, thus seduced 
from the paths of innocence and peace, thus con- 
founded in the toils that were deliberately spread for 
him, and overwhelmed by the mastering spirit and 
genius of another — this man, thus ruined and un- 
done and made to play a subordinate part in this 
grand drama of guilt and treason, this man is to be 
called the principal offender, while he by whom he 
was thus plunged in misery is comparatively inno- 
cent, a mere accessory! Is this reason? Is it law .^ 
Is it humanity? Sir, neither the human heart nor 
the human understanding will bear a perversion so 
monstrous and absurd ! So shocking to the soul ! 
So revolting to the reason! Let Aaron Burr then 
not shrink from the high destination which he has 
courted! And having already ruined Blennerhas- 
sett in fortune, character and happiness forever, let 
him not attempt to finish the tragedy by thrusting 
that ill-fated man between himself and punishment." 



Maryland in National Politics. 143 

From the date of this trial Wirt's standing 
as a lawyer rose, year by year. He even then 
occupied first position at the Virginia bar. 
Meanwhile he had become the firm friend of 
both Madison and Monroe, as well as the 
friend and disciple of Jefferson. Madison 
had succeeded to the Presidency, and in the 
process of forming a new Cabinet, Wirt was 
asked if he would become Secretary of State, 
then regarded as the stepping-stone to the 
office of Chief Executive itself. Nothing, 
however, could induce him to consider the 
matter. Of the offer he said that "I am about 
as fit to be Pope at Rome and I will not sacri- 
fice my wife and family upon the altar of 
political ambition." 

Wirt's eyes were turned upon the Attorney- 
Generalship, but Madison, after much hesita- 
tion, appointed William Pinkney, a Mary- 
lander, whose career has already been re- 
viewed in this volume. Madison, however, 
asked Wirt to take the District Attorneyship 
for Virginia and the offer was at once ac- 
cepted. This office was wholly in line with 
Wirt's professional training and aspira- 
tions. Moreover, it gave the young attorney 
a coveted opportunity to practice before the 
United States Supreme Court. And in his 
very first case before that tribunal it was 



144 Maryland in National Politics. 

Wirt's singular fortune to be opposed by the 
brilliant Pinkney, the beginning of a series of 
such contests. Welcoming the chance to meas- 
ure minds with the leading lawyer of the 
country, Wirt about this time wrote to a friend 
that "the blood more stirs to rouse the lion 
than to hunt the hare." 

The beginning of the succeeding administra- 
tion found Wirt in Monroe's Cabinet as At- 
torney-General. Though the Burr prosecu- 
tion had brought him nation-wide renown, 
this appointment at the hands of Monroe gave 
this Virginia-Marylander his first fixed rela- 
tion to the politics of his time. Moreover, it 
was the goal of his fondest dream and, having 
reached it, the new official entered upon his 
duties with a consuming enthusiasm. 

Almost immediately the new Attorney-Gen- 
eral plunged into the litigation then pending 
before the highest court. Two cases of great 
consequence, involving grave constitutional 
questions, were soon to be argued, and in each 
of them Wirt was face to face with the best 
legal minds of that period of our history. The 
first was McCulloch vs. the State of Maryland, 
and the second was the Dartmouth College 
case. On the side of the plaintiff in the Mc- 
Culloch case Wirt had as his associates Web- 
ster and Pinkney, while Luther Martin, Jones 



Maryland in National Politics. 145 

and Hopkinson constituted the opposition. A 
list of names more distinguished had never 
been associated in any legal cause in this coun- 
try. And the court was itself at that time the 
centre of the greatest national interest. It was 
a "holy sanctuary" — a "more than Amphicty- 
onic council," as Pinkney described it. Wirt 
and his associates won their fight, though the 
young Attorney-General was looked upon be- 
fore this proceeding as a mere boy just out of 
the debating-society stage of legal practice. 

In the Dartmouth College case Wirt was for 
the first time opposed by the great Webster, 
and, to his great chargin, he was unable to con- 
vince the court of the merit of his contentions. 
Webster was victorious, but was generous 
enough to say of Wirt's conduct of the defend- 
ant's cause that "it is the universal opinion that 
the argument was a full, able and most elo- 
quent exposition of the rights of the defend- 
ant. I will add that, in my opinion, no future 
discussion of the questions involved in the 
cause, either at the bar or on the bench, will 
bring forth, on the part of the defendant, any 
important idea which was not urged, ex- 
panded and pressed in the argument referred 
to." 

During the next few years Wirt and Pink- 
ney clashed repeatedly in the courts at Wash- 
10 



146 Maryland in National Politics. 

ington and at Baltimore. They stood out as 
great rivals at the bar, just as did Pinkney and 
Luther Martin a generation before. All the 
while, however, the warmest feeling of mutual 
regard existed between the two men, and when 
Pinkney died in 1822, Wirt wrote: "Poor 
Pinkney! He died opportunely for his fame. 
He could not have risen higher. He was a 
great man. On set occasion, the greatest, I 
think, at our bar." 

In 1829 Wirt retired from the Attorney- 
Generalship. He was not in sympathy with the 
Jackson administration and, besides, he wished 
to again return to private life. He had flat- 
tering offers of professional connections both 
at New York and Baltimore. He had long 
been anxious, however, to take up his resi- 
dence once more in his native State, and the 
same year that he resigned his Cabinet port- 
folio he removed with his family to Baltimore. 
He had for the past ten years been identified 
with the Maryland courts, the State judges 
waiving the three-year residence law in his be- 
half, on the ground that as an official of the 
federal government he was entitled to appear 
before any court of any State. 

This move brought Wirt to the threshold of 
the most interesting chapter in his whole 
career. As already stated, he was in direct op- 



Maryland in National Politics. 147 

position to the imperious President, and when 
Jackson came up for re-election in 1832 he en- 
listed at once in the Whig cause. He was 
named as a delegate from one of the Balti- 
more districts to the Whig Convention and 
announced his support of Henry Clay. Be- 
fore this convention could assemble, however, 
he found himself the nominee of another party, 
equally as hostile to Jackson as were the 
Whigs. 

The anti-Masonic party had come into be- 
ing before Wirt departed from Washington. 
It's rise was one of the strangest, yet most po- 
tential, events in our politics as a nation. As 
a movement politicians had sneered at it and 
pretended to ignore it, yet they found it in 
the campaign of this year a factor to be reck- 
oned with. The story of the agitation against 
Masonry is full of interest. 

William Morgan, a bricklayer of Batavia, 
N. Y., who had sought to earn a few dollars, 
had in 1826 written a book purporting to ex- 
pose the secrets of Free Masonry. He was a 
member of the order. The Masons of his 
community heard of this design and caused 
his arrest on some petty charge. He was im- 
prisoned over Sunday and, while absent, his 
house was searched for the manuscript. A 
month later Morgan was arrested a second 



148 Maryland in National Politics. 

time for a debt of $2.10 and imprisoned under 
an execution for $2.69, debt and costs. The 
following day the creditor announced that the 
debt was satisfied. Morgan was released, but 
as he walked out of the prison he was seized 
by a band of masked men, placed in a closed 
carriage and driven to Fort Niagara, where 
he was detained. 

A few days later a body was found floating; 
in the river and was identified as that of Mor- 
gan. Stubbornly the Masons denied that the 
dead man was Morgan, yet he was never heard 
of after that time. Meanwhile, the printer's 
shop which was supposed to have the manu- 
script was searched and burned. In the fol- 
lowing January a number of men were tried 
for conspiracy and abduction. They pleaded 
guilty to escape disclosure of details. They 
admitted abduction in the case of Morgan, but 
stoutly denied that their victim was dead. 
Even so, the general feeling throughout West- 
ern New York was that Morgan had been 
foully murdered, and as a result a demand 
arose for the banishment of all secret orders. 

A committee was appointed at a great mass- 
meeting to carry on an extra-legal investiga- 
tion into all the facts of the alleged outrage. 
As the matter proceeded it became so involved 
that no legal tribunal could make heads or 



Maryland in National Politics. 149 

tails of the affair. It did, however, find its 
way into local politics of that end of the State. 
The politicians tried desperately to keep 
Masonry down as an issue, but the inflamed 
passions of the people were aroused and could 
not be curbed. Candidates for office were 
cornered and made to declare themselves Ma- 
sons or Anti-Masons. All other questions 
were subordinated. 

The Masons defended themselves, first with 
the statement that no outrage in the form of 
murder and been proved, and second, on the 
ground that Masonry, as an institution, should 
not be discredited by a few misguided men 
who committed crimes in its name. This did 
not influence the people, however, and in a 
year the Masonic issue had torn to pieces the 
old parties in the State. 

In 1828 the anti-Masons aligned themselves 
with the followers of Clinton, the last guard 
of the old Federalists in New York. Thev 
were joined, too, by many "buck-tails." Jack- 
son and Clinton, who were themselves Masons, 
were allies in that year, but many of the antis 
refused to follow their late leader for Jackson 
as against Adams. This was the first split in 
national politics, forced by the Masonic issue. 

Gaining force month by month, the anti- 
Masons, by 1830, were a powerful factor 



150 Maryland in National Politics. 

in New York politics and put an anti-ad- 
ministration ticket in the field. From that 
move the agitation spread rapidly. Thousands 
of followers were gained in Massachusetts and 
Pennsylvania. Vermont became its strong- 
hold. In Connecticut and Ohio it had meas- 
urable strength. It was broadened by 1831 
to embrace the abolishment of all secret orders. 
Two old stalwarts, John Quincy Adams and 
Joseph Story, were so sympathetic that they 
spent days in an effort to destroy the Phi Beta 
Kappa fraternity at Harvard College. 

In September the national anti-Masonic 
party met in convention at Philadelphia, but 
proceeded no further than to issue a call for 
another meeting to be held a year later at Bal- 
timore, when candidates for the Presidency 
and Vice-Presidency would be nominated. 
When that body convened a second time, 
twelve States were represented by 112 dele- 
gates, among whom sat two history-makers of 
a later period — William H. Seward and 
Thaddeus Stevens. 

Sentiment in this convention was practically 
unanimous for the nomination of Wirt. One 
or two other names were considered for a 
time, but his was the only one that was placed 
in nomination, and the action of the delegates 
was unanimous. Amos EUmaker, of Pennsyl- 



Maryland in National Politics. 151 

vania, was placed on the ticket as his running 
mate. Wirt himself had taken two degrees in 
Masonry, but had long before neglected his 
duties to the order and had, in effect, aban- 
doned it. His letter of acceptance, addressed 
to the convention, did not embrace all the 
tenets of the new party. In this paper, for in- 
stance, he said that "Masonry and Anti-Ma- 
sonry are fitter subjects for farce than trag- 
edy." 

However, Wirt entered seriously into the 
spirited campaign that followed his nomina- 
tion. He put aside the Morgan case as an un- 
fit incident for political controversy, but he 
placed himself on a platform opposed to all 
secret oaths and orders which might interfere 
with the civic duties of a citizen. At the same 
time the party of which he was the titular 
leader issued a long address to the people out- 
lining its history and the principles for which 
it stood. 

It has long been doubted if Wirt would have 
accepted the anti-Masonic party nomination 
if he had not believed that Clay would with- 
draw as the Whig candidate, thereby making 
it possible for all the anti-Jackson forces to 
amalgamate. Clay himself refused to treat 
with the anti-Masons, and all opportunity of 
uniting the opposition behind him had van- 



152 Maryland in National Politics. 

ished. Clay stood pat against withdrawing, 
however, and Wirt's one chance of defeating 
Jackson went glimmering. 

The outcome of the election in 1832, with 
three tickets in the field, was a foregone con- 
clusion. The elements hostile to General 
Jackson were hopelessly divided, and in the 
end they seemed more bent upon crushing 
each other than in disloging the Democratic 
administration. Out of the 286 votes cast 
Jackson received 219, Clay 49 and Wirt 7. 
South Carolina refused to vote for any of the 
nominees and cast her eleven ballots for Floyd. 

This camgaign shattered forever Henry 
Clay's Presidential dream. Because of the 
third-party defection, his defeat was over- 
whelming. Wirt's candidacy had accom- 
plished that, even though he himself went 
down in the wreck. After the election the 
anti-Masonic party went into decline and in a 
few years had completely dissolved. Wirt, 
whose willingness to head this organization had 
been a distinct shock to many of his friends, 
was himself cast down. His distress over the 
result of the election was pathetic. 

About this time, too, domestic sorrows over- 
took this old Roman. They were followed by 
financial losses in Florida. Yet he continued 
to attend to his legal business in court and 



Maryland in National Politics. 153 

struggled for a few years longer in a vain 
effort to recoup his fortunes. He was still the 
premier of the bar, though a new generation 
of lawyers was coming forward. Roger B. 
Taney was assuming leadership among the 
abler young attorneys, and S. Teakle Wallis 
was beginning his law studies in Wirt's office. 

Wirt's death took place in 1834, while at- 
tending a session of the Supreme Court in 
Washington. His passing was as profoundly 
mourned as was that of any private citizen in 
all our history. The bench and bar alike 
united in paying tribute to the great lawyer 
and advocate. The day following his death 
the United States Supreme Court adjourned 
as a mark of respect to his memory. Daniel 
Webster delivered a memorial address upon 
Wirt from the bar of that court, and Chief 
Justice Marshall responded feelingly from 
the bench. 

On the day of the funeral both Houses of 
Congress adjourned. Such a proceeding had 
never before been accorded to any other than 
a member of one or the other house. In the 
funeral procession were the President, the 
Vice-President, members of the Cabinet, the 
Diplomatic Corps and the members of the 
House and Senate. Around Wirt's bier that 
day there gathered as illustrious a body of 



154 Maryland in National Politics. 

men as ever assembled at one time on this 
continent. In that silent concourse stood Jack- 
son, Adams, Calhoun, Van Buren, John Mar- 
shall, Story, Clay, Webster, Southard, Taney, 
Binney, Sargeant, Woodbury, Everett, Cass 
and Randolph — men of destiny if that may be 
said of any body of American statesmen. 



Maryland in National Politics. 155 

ROGER B. TANEY 

1777 — 1864 

American history may be searched from 
foundation to capstone, from Washington to 
Wilson, through and through, and in it will 
be found no man whose public service was 
marked by greater strife and stress, by more 
uncompromising denunciation, by more parti- 
san abuse than was that of Roger B. Taney, 
fifth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of 
the United States. 

He was a veritable storm centre from first to 
last of his long and honored career. As At- 
torney-General, as Secretary of the Treasury, 
and even as Chief Justice of the highest court, 
it was the same. No assault was too merciless 
to visit upon him. No calumny was too gross 
to apply to him. No villification was too false 
to heap upon him, and no baseness too un- 
speakable to impute to him. 

Such were the rancor, the vindictiveness, the 
bitterness and the enmities of the turbulent 
period in which Taney lived. He entered 
public life unknown beyond the confines of his 
native State. He left it more profoundly 
hated, more widely execrated, more violent- 



156 Maryland in National Politics. 

ly, yet unfairly stigmatized, than any servant 
of the republic before or after him. 

Time has, however, done ample justice to 
his memory and has superbly vindicated his 
public acts. Many of those who blackguarded 
him have passed along to be forgotten; others 
lived to retract and recant, while still others 
have been forced by the relentless judgement 
of the people to acknowledge the wrongs they 
committed against this Marylander. History 
has accorded him an abundant triumph over 
the impassioned slanders to which he was in 
life subjected. 

Many eminent historians point to Roger B. 
Taney as the greatest Marylander who ever 
lived. And this cannot be disputed if great- 
ness is to be determined by the measure of in- 
fluence a man may exercise in shaping the na- 
tional destiny. Certain it is that no other son 
of this State ever had so important a part in 
the vital affairs of the nation. The character 
of no other was impressed so firmly upon his 
time. 

The name of this great jurist is linked in- 
separably with the gravest crises in our na- 
tional life-crises, thatfinally led to the dismem- 
berment of the Union and to the bloodiest civil 
conflict in all time. By a fateful coincidence, 
too, his first and his last official act of serious 



Maryland in National Politics. 157 

import dealt directly with the issue upon 
which the States divided. As Attorney-Gen- 
eral in the Cabinet of Andrew Jackson, Roger 
B. Taney stood like a stone wall against the 
South Carolina nullification ordinance, and 
the firmness of these two men postponed the 
break between the North and South for a 
quarter of a century. Long afterward, as Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court, he delivered the 
Dred Scott decision, a decision that undid the 
work of Jackson and ended in four years of 
heart-breaking war. 

But these two epochal events do not tell the 
whole story of Taney. He was the man who 
stood behind the throne when the Bank of the 
United States was smashed; the man who, 
when the issue was joined, became Secretary 
of the Treasury long enough to take the gov- 
ernment money out of the bank — an act which 
ended the career of that discredited institu- 
tion. He, too, was the man put forward by 
Jackson as the defender of the administra- 
tion's desperate expedient. 

Unable to strike down the President himself 
for these moves against this money power, the 
enemies of the Jackson regime mustered 
their forces in the Senate to punish Taney. 
They rejected his nomination as Secretary of 
the Treasury, the only Cabinet appointee ever 



158 Maryland in National Politics. 

so dishonored in that body. Then, a year later, 
the same Senate defeated Taney's nomination 
as an Associate Justice of the United States 
Supreme Court, another act of reprisal against 
the Jackson administration. 



Taney's early life gave little promise of the 
share he was to have in the gravest drama of 
American politics. He had no passionate 
ambitions for a political career, no yearning 
for the struggles and rewards of public office. 
Urged by his father, he had stood for election 
as a member of the House of Delegates, short- 
ly after he was admitted to the bar. The sec- 
ond time he ran he was defeated. After his 
removal to Frederick he served one term in the 
State Senate. This was in 18 16, and was the 
last elective office which he filled. 

Five years before this time Taney had be- 
come widely known to the bar of his State, 
when he appeared as counsel for General Wil- 
kinson, then Commander-in-Chief of the 
American Army, when that old soldier was 
tried on a series of charges before a military 
tribunal convened at Frederick. General 
Wilkinson had been involved in the treason- 
able schemes of Aaron Burr, had later turned 
State's evidence, and had incurred enmities 



Maryland in National Politics. 159 

which resulted in his arraignment before the 
military court. Wilkinson was acquitted and 
his sword returned to him. Taney's conduct 
of this case gave him his first prominence as a 
practitioner. 

Following the deaths of Pinkney and Luther 
Martin, Taney removed to Baltimore. At that 
time William Wirt was the ablest lawyer 
practicing before the Maryland courts. He 
was yet Attorney-General of the United States, 
but shortly afterward resigned to give all his 
time to his private practice in Baltimore. 
There he found the young Taney his strongest 
antagonist, a fact to which he testified in many 
letters preserved by Kennedy, Wirt's biogra- 
pher. 

At this period Taney's one aspiration was 
eminence as a lawyer. He withdrew entirely 
from politics and devoted his whole time and 
talents to his profession. There was but one 
office in the State that attracted him. He had 
long been ambitious to become Attorney-Gen- 
eral, a position which had been honored by 
many of the greatest lawyers in the State's his- 
tory. In 1827 this wish was gratified, when 
Governor Kent tendered him the appointment. 

Three years later, however, Taney was 
drawn into the whirlpool of national ^fifairs 
by forces of which he was at the time wholly 



i6o Maryland in National Politics. 

unconscious. General Jackson had been elected 
President in 1828 and had assumed office on 
March 4, 1829. Within a year he was in con- 
troversy with half the members of his Cabinet, 
and as a result all of them offered their resig- 
nations. In the process of forming a new Cab- 
inet, the President freely consulted personal 
friends, and one of them, Dr. William Jones, a 
native Marylander, suggested, in a conversa- 
tion with the Executive, that he knew the very 
man the President wanted for Attorney-Gen- 
eral. "That man is Roger B. Taney, of the 
Baltimore bar," said Dr. Jones, "he is now the 
leading lawyer in Maryland and a zealous 
friend of your administration." 

A little later Francis Scott Key, author of 
"The Star-Spangled Banner" and a brother-in- 
law ofTaney,approached the Marylander with 
the suggestion that he join the Jackson ad- 
ministration. A few days afterward Secretary 
of State Livingston in the following letter 
tendered, on behalf of the Executive, the ap- 
pointment to Taney: 

"Sir, I have great satisfaction in obeyini^ the 
President's instructions to inform you that he has 
this day appointed you Attorney-General of the 
United States, and to ask your acceptance of the 
office. 

"Mr. Berrien will be employed for a few days in 
arranging the business of the office in order to trans- 



Maryland in National Politics. i6i 

fer it to you, should you signify your acceptance, in 
which case your commission will be made out, ready 
to be delivered when you shall find it convenient to 
come on and assume the duties of this office." 

In this extraordinary manner began the na- 
tional career of one of the most interesting 
characters in all our history. Taney accepted 
the Attorney-Generalship, the only office un- 
der the federal government for which he felt 
in any degree fitted. It is to be doubted, how- 
ever, what this course would have been at this 
turning point in his life, could he have fore- 
seen the enmities, the antagonisms and the 
venomous billingsgate he was destined to en- 
counter. 

Before General Jackson's first term was far 
advanced, he forced issues upon the two para- 
mount questions then before the country. He 
announced his determination to resist the nulli- 
fication movement in South Carolina and, at 
the same time, his inveterate hostility to the 
Bank of the United States. And into each of 
these historic struggles the new Attorney- 
General plunged with an enthusiasm and 
loyalty that warmed the heart of the old 
soldier in the White House. 

Calhoun, who had fathered the nullificatipn 
doctrine in the Senate, basing his defence of it 
upon the theory that, in as much as the Con- 
stitution authorizes three-fourths of the States 
11 



1 62 Maryland in National Politics. 

to amend or change it, the same Constitution 
conferred upon three-fourths of the States the 
right to settle constitutional questions raised 
between the States and the federal govern- 
ment. By this doctrine he inferred the right 
of a State to nullify, within its territory, any 
statute passed by Congress which it deemed 
unconstitutional. When such an issue is 
raised, Calhoun contended, it was the duty of 
the government to refer it to the arbitrament 
of the States, leaving it to be declared constitu- 
tional or not. If constitutional, the State must 
submit, or else it might secede. 

Such a doctrine Jackson, backed by legal 
adviser Taney, repudiated as one subversive 
of all federal authority. Realizing, however, 
the determination with which South Carolina 
would adhere to the theory of its idol in the 
Senate, these two men took steps to safeguard 
the Union. Meanwhile, South Carolina passed 
its famous nullification ordinance in Novem- 
ber, 1832. This document was hurried to 
Washington, and after it had been digested by 
Taney and his views upon it had been given to 
the President, Jackson prepared, with the aid 
of Livingston, the proclamation embodying 
in efifect, the declaration that, "The Federal 
Union : It must and shall be preserved." This 
proclamation electrified the whole country. 



Maryland in National Politics. 163 

In it the soldier-President showed his teeth, 
set his jaw and gave the South Carolinians a 
warning so ominous that their retreat to the 
tall timbers of security was most precipitate. 

In his support of Jackson's anti-nullification 
policy, Taney engaged in his first struggle for 
the supremacy of the Federal Constitution. 
It, too, was his first brush with the sectional 
issue, an issue which he in later years, by judi- 
cial act, fanned to a white heat. But the gift 
of prophesy was denied him, and the share he 
was to have in the sullen controversy of the 
next generation could not at this time be re- 
vealed to him. 

Meantime Taney had before him a crisis 
more momentous than nullification, in so far 
as it involved his personal fortunes. He was 
to become the most conspicuous actor in the 
death-grapple with the Bank of the United 
States. It was Jackson's part to declare re- 
lentless war upon this institution, but it was 
Taney's part to lead the campaign of destruc- 
tion to a successful conclusion. 

In his first message to Congress President 
Jackson announced his uncompromising op- 
position to the Bank, the organ of the coun- 
try's money power and an establishment which 
Alexander Hamilton had created to promote 
his centralizing policy. For a quarter of a 



164 Maryland in National Politics. 

century this institution had been a leading po- 
litical issue. It had been twice rechartered 
by Congress, and in 1836 was expected to ap- 
ply for another lease of life. Jackson could 
not feel certain of re-election, and he decided 
to put the bank out of business while he was 
yet in power. In this determination he had 
the unwavering support of his Attorney-Gen- 
eral. 

In his second annual message to Congress, 
a message written almost wholly by Taney, 
Jackson gave to the country the first warning 
signal of his program, when he said "that such 
measures as are within the reach of the Secre- 
tary of the Treasury have been taken to enable 
him to judge whether the public deposits in 
that institution may be regarded as entirely 
safe; but as his limited power may prove in- 
adequate to this object, I recommend the sub- 
ject to the attention of Congress under the firm 
belief that it is worthy of their serious consid- 
eration." 

This passage had exposed the secret. Jack- 
son meditated the withdrawal of the govern- 
ment deposits from the bank. The intimation 
contained in his message came like a thunder- 
bolt from a clear sky. The friends of the in- 
stitution, in Congress and out, were thrown 
into a panic of fear. They had not believed 



Maryland in National Politics. 165 

Jackson capable of so daring a move. They 
could not believe it possible that he would de- 
liberately pull the pillars from under the 
financial temple. Least of all did they then 
suspect that the calm but resolute Attorney- 
General had conceived this scheme and had 
offered himself as a willing sacrifice in its ex- 
ecution. 

But the record is clear. In Tyler's biogra- 
phy of Taney appears a private letter written 
to the President in 1833, proposing that the 
deposits of the government be withdrawn from 
the Bank of the United States, urging that this 
was the only means of accomplishing the fixed 
purpose of the administration, and suggesting 
that Secretary Duane be directed to proceed at 
once with the program which the Attorney- 
General outlined. Anticipating that Duane 
would demur, Taney added this tender of his 
services : 

"If you should finally make up your mind to adopt 
the measure, and should find it necessary to call for 
my services to aid in carrying it into execution, 
they will be promptly and willingly rendered; and 
I have though it to be my duty, after what passed be- 
tween us on the morning of your departure, to give 
you this assurance." 

Under the law, it was within the discretion 
of the Secretary of the Treasury whether or 
not government moneys should be deposited in 



1 66 Maryland in National Politics. 

the National bank or State banks. The Presi- 
dent could not remove the deposits, but he 
could remove the Secretary. Acting upon Ta- 
ney's proposal, Jackson at once directed Secre- 
tary Duane to withdraw all federal funds then 
in the National bank. Duane refused to take 
that responsibility, whereupon the President 
summarily dismissed him from the Cabinet 
and in the following letter designated Taney 
to be Secretary of the Treasury: 

"Sir: Having informed William J. Duane, Esq., 
this morning that I have no further use for his serv- 
ices as Secretary of the Treasury of the United 
States, I hereby appoint you Secretary in his stead, 
and hope you will accept the same and enter upon the 
duties thereof forthwith, so that no injury may ac- 
crue to the public service. Please signify to me your 
acceptance or non-acceptance of this appointment. 

"I am with great respect, your obedient servant, 

"Andrew Jackson." 

On the 24th day of September, 1833, Taney 
assumed the duties of Secretary of the Treas- 
ury under a recess appointment. Two days 
later he issued his order for the removal of the 
deposits. Immediately thereafter the bank 
entered upon a campaign designed to throw 
the country into a financial panic. "For 
months there were the most fearful scenes of 
dismay and ruin. Commerce became embar- 
rassed. Property became unsalable. The 



Maryland in National Politics. 167 

price of produce and labor were reduced to 
the lowest point. Thousands and tens of thou- 
sands of laborers were thrown out of employ- 
ment, and many wealthy people were reduced 
to poverty. And all this distress the bank 
strove to make the sufferers believe was caused 
by the removal of the deposits." 

When the "Panic Session" of Congress met 
in the following December, Jackson imposed 
the duty upon Taney of defending the action 
of the administration in taking the drastic 
means of destroying the bank. In a 5,000- 
word address to Congress, Taney explained 
and vindicated the President and the Cabinet. 
This address Benton describes as one of the 
ablest papers in all the annals of Congress. It 
did not, however, appease the opposition. 
Webster, Clay and Calhoun, that triumvirate 
of giants, united in denouncing the President 
and his Secretary. Each House of Congress 
rang with defamatory speeches anathematiz- 
ing Jackson and Taney and holding them up 
to the scorn of the people. No such volume of 
protest and abuse had ever before been heard 
in the national capitol. 

These tirades, however, left Jackson and 
Taney unmoved. They refused to recede an 
inch. They believed they had acted for the 
ultimate good of the country, and did not pro- 



1 68 Maryland in National Politics. 

pose to be stampeded by the shouts of infuri- 
ated legislators. 

Just before the session came to an end, how- 
ever, Congress had its inning. The President, 
under the law, was forced to send the nomina- 
tion of Taney to the Senate for confirmation 
before adjournment came. He waited until 
the eleventh hour, realizing that the odds were 
against confirmation. And they were. Webs- 
ter and Clay had organized a majority to de- 
feat it, and as soon as received it was promptly 
rejected. That was the first time in history that 
a President had been affronted by the refusal 
of the Senate to confirm a member of the Ex- 
ecutive household. The day after this action 
was taken Taney resigned. 

The first period of Taney's public service, 
therefore, ended under unhappy circum- 
stances. But his mortification at the Senate's 
action was short-lived. The reception accord- 
ed him upon his return to Baltimore swept it 
all aside. No conquering hero was ever more 
royally welcomed home than was Taney by 
the people of the State. He was driven into 
the city in a carriage drawn by eight white 
horses and was accompanied by thousands of 
horsemen. Bands of music played; women 
and children frantically waved their greeting, 
and the streets were thronged with people 



Maryland in National Politics. 169 

eager to acclaim him. Such was the approval 
of Taney's course by his fellow-citizens. 

The national bank controversy might have 
been the end of Taney's service to his country 
but for Jackson's determination to reward the 
Marylander in some measure for the sacrifice 
he had made in behalf of the administration. 
A few months after Taney's return to Balti- 
more, Gabriel Duvall, himself a Marylander, 
resigned as an Associate Justice of the United 
States Supreme Court. Without a day's de- 
lay, the President nominated Taney for the 
vacancy. But there was in the Senate the same 
hostile majority. Clay and Webster had an-- 
other opportunity to chasten the administra- 
tion, and by a skillful maneuver they had 
Taney's nomination "indefinitely postponed," 
thereby defeating it. For a second time with- 
in a year Taney had sustained rebuff at the 
hands of this body. John Rutledge was the 
only other nominee for the Supreme Court 
who had been denied a seat upon this bench 
by the Senate. 

Before a year had gone by the President 
seized yet another and greater opportunity to 
honor his faithful friend and adviser. Chief 
Justice Marshall died in the summer of 1835, 
and in the following December Jackson nomi- 
nated Taney to fill that exalted vacancy. 



170 Maryland in National Politics. 

Meantime, the political complexion of the Sen- 
ate had changed and, though Clay and Web- 
ster prosecuted a relentless campaign against 
the confirmation, their violent assaults failed. 
Taney's friends upon the final vote had a ma- 
jority of fourteen. 

When Chief Justice Taney ascended the Su- 
preme Bench of the United States on March 
15, 1836, a judicial career without parallel in 
our history was inaugurated. John Marshall 
served six years longer than did Taney, thirty- 
four in all. It, too, was the great Virginian's 
privilege to plant deeper the principles of con- 
stitutional government in our system, but it 
fell to the lot of Roger B. Taney to deal, as a 
jurist, with the gravest political problems that 
have ever forced themselves upon the republic. 

To this task Taney brought a profound 
knowledge of law in all its branches. His 
practice in Maryland had been broad, embrac- 
ing common law, equity jurisprudence and 
maritime law. He was grounded in the sub- 
stantive no less than in the procedural side of 
the science. Moreover, "these accomplish- 
ments were built upon a character proof 
against the poisoned arrows of his bitterest 
enemies and illumined by a mind singularly 
clear, logical and analytical." 



Maryland in National Politics. 171 

It is manifestly impossible to review within 
the limits of this sketch all the important de- 
cisions of the Supreme Court in which Taney 
participated. Only those, therefore, having 
the most direct bearing upon the stirring poli- 
tics of his time will be alluded to. But before 
such of them as related to the slavery issue are 
approached, the Warren Bridge case, because 
of its efifect upon present-day issues, should be 
briefly cited. 

Many eminent lawyers now hold that in this 
litigation Chief Justice Taney delivered the 
first anti-trust decision ever rendered by the 
Supreme Court. Without burdening this ar- 
ticle with the facts upon which the Warren 
Bridge Case was tried, it is sufficient to say 
that Taney laid down the rule that no corpora- 
tion may exercise any power as a corporation, 
except such as is specifically granted by the 
terms of its charter. The State granting that 
charter, therefore, may limit the character of 
the corporation, may prohibit it from engag- 
ing in monopolistic enterprises, and may re- 
quire it to go to the State legislature for every 
privilege which it exercises. Nothing is, un- 
der this decision, granted to a corporation by 
presumption or implication. State control of 
its chartered bodies is absolute. Incidentally, 
this is the first case involving a constitutional 



172 Maryland in National Politics. 

question in which Daniel Webster ever met de- 
feat. 

It was with the institution of slavery as it 
came before his court, however, with which 
Taney's name will be forever associated. And 
it was prophetic that the very first opinion 
which he delivered (United States vs. The 
Garonne) involved a slave. In a little less 
than twenty-five years from that time this 
same Chief Justice rendered the opinion of the 
court in the celebrated Dred Scott case, one, 
it is safe to say, fraught with more vital conse- 
quences than any ever presented to an Anglo- 
Saxon tribunal for judgment. And no judge, 
not even the notorious Jeffries, was ever more 
ruthlessly assailed than was Taney, because of 
his part in this litigation. 

The Dred Scott decision had been anxiously 
awaited North and South. The years preced- 
ing it had been leading inevitably to a momen- 
tous climax. From end to end of the country 
the warning thunder of a titanic conflict 
was heard. The Kansas-Nebraskan bill had 
taken the place of the Missouri Compromise. 
The two sections were even then fighting des- 
perately for possession of Kansas. The Re- 
publican party had been organized, pledged 
to the abolition of slavery, and four years later 
was destined to elect a President. In the midst 



Maryland in National Politics. 173 

of this frantic state of party feeling the Dred 
Scott decree was issued. 

Instantly it became the battle-cry of the 
Free-Soil party. All other issues were subor- 
dinated. Unmeasured vituperation was hurled 
at it and its author. To paraphrase Burke, 
"reason was driven from her throne and pas- 
sion usurped her seat." A mighty upheaval 
shook the country, and before it subsided the 
North and South had hurled themselves at 
each other in a war unto the death. The ven- 
erable Taney, notwithstanding his high posi- 
tion, was derided and mocked even on the 
floor of Congress itself. Seward in the Senate, 
and Stevens in the House, pictured him "as a 
monster robed in the habiliments of justice," 
while the lesser defamers shouted in unison. 

But this stalwart old jurist breasted the 
storm. The yelping hounds of politics snarled 
and snapped and sneered in vain. The light- 
ning flashed about him and the winds hissed 
in his ears, but they did not move him. His 
calm dignity withstood every assault. Not 
even the contempt of the President himself, 
when Lincoln, in the Merryman habeas corpus 
case, defied the authority of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, could shake the 
self-restraint of this Chief Justice. In that fa- 
mous proceeding, the only one of its kind in all 



174 Maryland in National Politics. 

our history, Taney, still maintaining the su- 
premacy of the civil over the military lav^, 
rested his case upon this historical declaration: 
"I have exercised all the power which the 
Constitution and the laws confer upon me; but 
that power has been resisted by a force too 
strong for me to overcome. I shall, therefore, 
order all the proceedings in this case transmit- 
ted, under seal, to the President of the United 
States. It will then remain for that high offi- 
cer, in fulfillment of his constitutional obliga- 
tion, to 'take care that the laws shall be faith- 
fully executed,' to determine what measures 
he will take to cause the civil processes of the 
United States to be respected and enforced." 

Taney did not live to enjoy the vindication 
that has since come to him. He died in 1864. 
while the country was yet in the throes of civil 
strife, while sectional passions still were in- 
flamed. He did, however, linger long enough 
to witness the venomous Seward's recantation. 
That act marked the turning of the tide, and 
today this Marylander has undisputed rank 
with the greatest minds and the truest patriots 
of our national history. 



Maryland in National Politics. 175 

REVERDY JOHNSON 

1796 — 1876 

In approaching the Civil War period of 
American history, a period more critical than 
any in the career of the republic, four charac- 
ters of commanding interest stand out as 
Maryland's generous contribution to the states- 
manship of the time. 

Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Su- 
preme Court of the United States; Henry 
Winter Davis, the most impassioned orator in 
either branch of Congress; Montgomery Blair, 
who sat in Lincoln's Cabinet, and Reverdy 
Johnson, the recognized leader of the Union 
Democrats in the Senate, composed that illus- 
trious group. 

No individual State was more notably rep- 
resented in the three co-ordinate branches of 
the federal government during that fateful 
crisis. And had it not been for the weight of 
their influence at home, coupled with the force 
of their leadership at Washington, it cannot be 
doubted that Maryland would have eventually 
cast her lot with the Southern Confederacy, 
vastly strengthening the rebellion and com- 
pletely isolating the National Capital. 



176 Maryland in National Politics. 

During the long, desperate struggle leading 
up to open hostilities between the North and 
South, during the four years of bloody strife, 
and during the Reconstruction era that fol- 
lowed, Reverdy Johnson was a towering fig- 
ure. Taney may have hastened the Civil War 
by his Dred Scott decision; Blair and Davis 
may have had leading parts in the tragedy of 
disunion, but neither was a more powerful fac- 
tor than was Reverdy Johnson in determining 
the course of our history at this period. 

For many years the ablest lawyer at the bar 
of the Supreme Court, Attorney-General in 
the Whig Cabinet of Zachary Taylor, twice a 
member of the United States Senate and a peer 
in that body of Webster, Benton, Calhoun and 
Clay, Johnson had become a veteran in na- 
tional affairs before the war betewen the States 
eventuated, the war that presented him to the 
country as the most brilliant, the most re- 
sourceful champion of peace and civil liberty 
then in public life. 

And it was his splendid service as an ex- 
pounder of the Constitution, before the bar of 
the courts as well as on the floor of Congress, 
at a time when riotous passion and prejudice 
sought to distort the meaning of that organic 
act or to defeat its sacred guarantees, which 



Maryland in National Politics. 177 

entitles Johnson to an enduring place in the 
annals of our government. At the head of an 
obstinate, though numerically impotent, mi- 
nority he fought desperately against the ex- 
citement, the distraction, the blind fury which 
daily threatened to sweep all constitutional 
law and its safeguards into the limbo of con- 
flicting elements. 

In his debates with Sumner, with Trumbull 
and with Howe on the Senate floor, he resisted 
with unfailing determination the same tidal 
wave he had breasted as volunteer counsel for 
Dred Scott years before. His subsequent ap- 
pearances before the Supreme Court in behalf 
of Cummings and Garland and Milligan, and 
lastly, his defence of Mrs. Surratt, found him 
battling valiantly on the side of law and rea- 
son and justice, under the Constitution, as 
against fanatical oppression and the usurpa- 
tion of militarism. 

It was this Marylander, too, who saved An- 
drew Johnson from a verdict of guilty in the 
impeachment proceedings and the country 
from the demoralization that would have in- 
evitably followed had the Presidency been va- 
cated. As a reward for this, the Executive 
appointed his defender Minister to Great 
Britain to handle the delicate negotiations 
n 



178 Maryland in National Politics. 

arising out of England's unfriendly course 
during the war. 



When Reverdy Johnson was admitted to the 
Maryland bar in 1816 a few of the Old Guard 
lawyers yet remained upon the scene. Wil- 
liam Pinkney was dividing his time between 
the courts and the Senate; Luther Martin had 
just reached the zenith of his career; William 
Wirt was rapidly forging to the front, and 
Robert Goodloe Harper had not yet reached 
his decline. Gabriel Duvall and Samuel 
Chase had withdrawn from active practice to 
take seats upon the Supreme Court of the 
United States. Roger B. Taney was just ris- 
ing to a position of prominence. 

There were giants at the bar of Maryland 
in those days. No State, before or since, has 
produced at a given time a battery of legal 
talent more transcendingly brilliant. Thus 
surrounded, the heart of young Johnson was 
fired by a mastering ambition to one day take 
rank with the great lawyers and powerful ad- 
vocates who had given a nation-wide renown 
to his State. He opened his first law office at 
Upper Marlboro, and a few years later he was 
named as an assistant Attorney-General of the 
State. In 18 17 he moved to Baltimore, where 



Maryland in National Politics. 179 

he early attracted the attention of attorneys 
and litigants. 

After serving for a short time in the State 
Senate, Johnson came prominently before the 
people by his connection with the Bank of 
Maryland, an institution that failed in 1834, 
plunging the whole community into a panic 
and involving the reputations of many of the 
leading citizens of the city and State. The 
story of this failure is told in the sketch of 
General Samuel Smith, printed in a previous 
chapter. Johnson, as counsel for the bank, 
was held responsible by many people for its 
disastrous transactions. While popular in- 
dignation was at its height his family were 
driven from the city, his home wrecked and 
he himself temporarily banished. This storm 
soon cleared away, however, and his personal 
probity was re-established. The State, by act of 
the legislature, indemnified him for his losses. 

So sweeping was Johnson's vindication that 
in 1845 he was elected to the United States 
Senate by an overwhelming vote. And from 
the date of this election Johnson's career be- 
longs to the nation rather than to his State. 
He had, even then, assumed a station of prim- 
acy at the bar as the worthy successor of his 
earlier contemporaries. As soon as he entered 
the Senate he leaped into prominence by his 



i8o Maryland in National Politics. 

masterly treatment of the constitutional ques- 
tions then uppermost in the public mind. 

War with Mexico was about to be declared ; 
the annexation of Texas was being pressed by 
a powerful following of the Polk administra- 
tion; nullification as championed by the un- 
conquerable Calhoun was agitating the coun- 
try; the Oregon question was still unsettled, 
and the first serious slavery issue was being 
debated by each branch of Congress. This 
was the state of the Union when Reverdy 
Johnson appeared for the first time upon the 
national stage. 

Bernard C. Steiner, in his review of John- 
son's life, ably sums up the Maryland Sena- 
tor's activities at this time. He says: 

"Johnson's first important speech was upon the 
Oregon question, and was made in 1846. In it his 
eloquence was directed to an attack upon the admin- 
istration, but two months later, Johnson broke from 
his party, declared that he believed a state of war 
existed between Mexico and the United States, and 
that the territory of the United States had been in- 
vaded. He would have voted against the annex- 
ation of Texas, but did not think his country was the 
aggressor in the war. The war was not begun to 
annex territory, and his acute mind foresaw that the 
questions 'Hkely to arise on the admission of any new 
territory' might 'cause the Union to totter to its 
very foundations.' He also opposed on constitu- 
tional grounds 'any clause prohibiting slavery in 
territory which may be acquired,' as the States are 



Maryland in National Politics. i8i 

equal in all respects, and consequently the citizens 
of slave States should not be prohibited by Congress 
from settling with their slaves in acquired territory. 
He was not a pro-slavery man, however, but said, 'I 
have ever believed, since I was capable of thought, 
that slavery is a great affliction to any country where 
it prevails.' " 

In 1848 Zachary Taylor was elected Presi- 
dent. That old hero had been taken up by 
the Whigs. With the glamour of a success- 
ful war about him and the follies of the Polk 
administration as an issue, he swept the coun- 
try. In the process of forming a Cabinet the 
new President, himself unfamiliar with the 
career of public men or the course of public 
events, was advised to name Johnson Attor- 
ney-General. Though the Marylander was 
but an eleventh-hour follower of the Whig 
standard, his selection was a fortunate one for 
the wholly uninitiated Executive. The new 
official brought to the incoming administra- 
tion a mind as acutely balanced and a compre- 
hension of constitutional problems as broad, 
perhaps, as could be found North or South. 
When Taylor died, a year later, Johnson forth- 
with resigned his portfolio, and what might 
have been a splendid Cabinet record came to 
an untimely end. 

Retiring to private practice after this com- 
paratively brief season at the seat of govern- 



1 82 Maryland in National Politics. 

ment, Johnson did not reappear before the 
country until 1854, when he, without fee, be- 
came counsel for Dred Scott in a case that has 
no parallel, in the weight of its consequences, 
in all American history. Twice this cause was 
heard by the United States Supreme Court, 
and each time the burden of the defence rested 
upon Johnson, though Senator Geyer of Mis- 
souri, himself a native Marylander, supported 
Johnson. Opposing them were Montgomery 
Blair, of Maryland, and George Ticknor 
Curtis. 

Johnson won a notable victory when Chief 
Justice Taney delivered the opinion of the 
Court, sustaining every important contention 
Scott's counsel had presented. But it was a 
triumph for which the country paid dearly in 
the succeeding years. The unreasoning re- 
sentment aroused among the anti-slavery peo- 
ple by this decision has already been discussed 
in the sketch of Chief Justice Taney. Around 
that jurist a storm broke which did not sub- 
side until the Union had been wrecked and 
^he country had been reddened with fratrici- 
dal blood. 

In the hope of averting the calamity of 
civil war, however, one last desperate expedi- 
ent was resorted to when, early in July, 1861, 
a Peace Commission was proposed by Con- 



Maryland in National Politics. 183 

gress, with authority to negotiate with a simi- 
lar body from the Southern States. On this 
commission one member of Congress from 
each State was to be appointed and, in addi- 
tion, seven eminent citizens, among whom 
were the three living ex-Presidents of the 
United States. The citizen commissioners 
were Millard Fillmore, of New York; Mar- 
tin Van Buren, of New York; Franklin 
Pierce, of New Hampshire; Edward Everett, 
of Massachusetts; Thomas Ewing, of Ohio; 
James Guthrie, of Kentucky, and Reverdy 
Johnson, of Maryland. 

About the same time Governor Hicks ap- 
pointed Johnson as one of the five delegates 
from Maryland to the Peace Congress to be 
held in Washington. He was later named by 
that Congress upon a committee of one from 
each State to consult upon any means they 
might ''deem right, necessary and proper to 
restore harmony and preserve the Union.'' 
Though an anti-slavery man at heart, Johnson 
firmly believed in the constitutional protection 
due that institution, and he labored feverishly 
in an effort to bring about peace by orderly 
processes. But it was too late. Compromises 
were no longer possible. All the peace move- 
ments met failure. War, and war alone, was 
to be the arbiter. 



184 Maryland in National Politics. 

Meanwhile Johnson had allied himself with 
the Democratic party, had supported Doug- 
las for the Presidency, but, with the election 
of Lincoln, had thrown himself into the 
Union cause. And to stem the tide in the 
State then running dangerously toward dis- 
union, he stood for election to the Maryland 
House of Delegates. After a bitter fight in 
that body Johnson and his associates overcame 
the secessionists, holding Maryland firmly in 
the Union column. The successful issue of 
this contest resulted in Johnson's second elec- 
tion to the United States Senate, after an in- 
terval of thirteen years. 

Immediately upon his arrival in Washing- 
ton Johnson assumed, by common consent, the 
leadership of the conservative forces in Con- 
gress. Partisanship there was rampant. The 
extremists were in the ascendency. The ran- 
cor, the vindictiveness, the prejudice which 
culminated in the proscriptions, the disfran- 
chisements and confiscations of the Recon- 
struction period, were enjoying the fullest li- 
cense even at that early stage of the war. 
Against this wave Johnson steadied himself, 
invoking the Constitution and the principles 
of common justice against the excesses prac- 
ticed in the name of the ''war powers of gov- 
ernment." 



Maryland in National Politics. 185 

He led this reactionary movement on the 
floor of the Senate and was met by overwhelm- 
ing resistance. Failing there to curb oppres- 
sion, he carried his fight, as a volunteer de- 
fender of constitutional liberty, before the Su- 
preme Court itself. 

Johnson appeared in the four famous cases 
of this time, each involving the penal restraint 
of civil liberty or the legality of military com- 
missions, then seeking to usurp the functions 
of established courts of justice. He went to 
the rescue of Mrs. Surratt, who was being 
tried for her life on the charge of complicity 
in the assassination of Lincoln, before a mili- 
tary commission. His brief in that case, 
though unavailing, was an unanswerable in- 
dictment of the mode of procedure by which 
this unfortunate woman was deprived of her 
right to a fair and impartial trial. 

It was in the course of this proceeding that 
Senator Johnson was subjected to as brutal and 
gratuitous an insult as was ever heaped upon a 
man of his years and honors by a civilized 
tribunal. And this humiliating experience, 
reflecting as it did upon his patriotism and 
loyalty to a government to which he had given 
all that mortal man could give, rankled in his 
stout old heart to the end of his days. 



1 86 Maryland in National Politics. 

When Johnson presented himself at the bar 
of this high-handed court as counsel for a 
helpless and friendless woman, about to be 
judicially murdered, he was immediately con- 
fronted with an objection "to his admission as 
counsel before this court, on the ground that 
he did not recognize the moral obligation of 
an oath that is designed as a test of loyalty." 
In support of this objection the fact was cited 
that he had more than a year before addressed 
a letter to the people of Maryland, pending 
the adoption of their Constitution, giving his 
views as to the character of oath which that 
instrument might properly exact. This delib- 
erate aspersion had no sooner reached its mark 
than the venerable, gray-haired statesman and 
lawyer turned, with blazing indignation, upon 
the military martinets who had accused him, 
declaring: 

"No member of this court recognizes the obliga- 
tion of an oath more absolutely than I do, and there 
is nothing in my life, from its commencement to the 
present time, which would induce me for a moment 
to avoid a comparison in all moral respects between 
myself and any member of this body. 

"I have taken the oath in the Senate of the United 
States," continued this brave old fighter, "the very 
oath you are administering here; I have taken it in 
the Circuit Court of the United States; I have taken 
it in the Supreme Court of the United States; and I 
am a practitioner in all the courts of the United States, 



Maryland in National Politics. 187 

in nearly all the States. And it would be a little 
singular if one who has the right to appear before 
the Supreme Judicial Tribunal of the land, and one 
who has the right to appear before one of the legis- 
lative departments of the government, whose law 
creates armies, creates judges and courts-martial, 
should be denied the right to appear before this 
court-martial." 

The military judges yielded, under this with- 
ering rebuke, and consented to the appearance 
of the Marylander. This trial revived the 
grave issue of military despotism, the same is- 
sue that was involved in the Ex Parte Milli- 
gan case, which Johnson argued before the Su- 
preme Court in 1866. In this he and his as- 
sociates overturned the lawless policy of the 
administration in suspending the writ of 
habeas corpus under the guise of martial law. 
Milligan, a peaceful citizen of Indiana, had 
been arrested by Secretary Stanton's spies, 
charged with disloyalty to the Union, was 
tried before a military tribunal and sentenced 
to death. He appealed to the United States 
courts, and when his case finally reached the 
Supreme Court, the petitioner was defended 
by Johnson, Joseph E. McDonald, Jeremiah 
S. Black, James A. Garfield and David Dud- 
ley Field. Opposing this phalanx were At- 
torney-General Speed, Former Attorney-Gen- 
eral Stansbury and Benjamin F. Butler. After 



1 88 Maryland in National Politics. 

a full hearing the Court overruled the mili- 
tary proceeding and set Milligan free. 

A little later Johnson took up the cause of 
theRev.FatherCummings, a Catholic priest of 
Missouri, who had been thrown into jail be- 
cause he had undertaken to preach the Gospel 
without having taken the "oath of loyalty." 
Johnson, Field and Montgomery Blair pre- 
sented the Cummings case to the Supreme 
Court. John B. Henderson and G. P. Strong 
led the prosecution. The Court here held that 
in proscribing this oath the State of Missouri, 
in effect, had tried to inflict punishment by 
attainder, an act clearly in violation of the 
Federal Constitution. The same great ques- 
tion was involved in the Ex Parte Garland 
case, which Johnson, again without remunera- 
tion, presented to the Supreme Court. In this 
the Ex Post Facto oath was once more de- 
clared unconstitutional. 

These triumphs were splendid tributes to 
Johnson's acumen as a profound interpreter 
of constitutional law. They were, however, 
more creditable to him because of the abiding 
patriotism which prompted him to take up, 
without thought of reward, the cause of civil 
liberty. And the same passion for simple jus- 
tice to all interests, whether those interests 
were in rebellion against the government or 



Maryland in National Politics. 189 

were exhausting the resources of a nation 
to restore the Union, marked the whole of 
Johnson's career in the Senate. He was in 
conflict almost daily with the uncompromising 
Sumner. He measured swords with Fessen- 
den and dared to controvert the ablest of them 
all, Lyman Trumbull. These discussions were, 
however, mere skirmishes in comparison with 
the great debate on the Reconstruction policy 
staged in the Thirty-ninth Congress, when 
Johnson dramatically defended the doctrine 
of State vitality against the powerful assault 
of Timothy O. Howe, of Wisconsin. This, 
the most stirring debate of its time, is graph- 
ically reviewed in "Three Decades of Federal 
Legislation," by "Sunset" Cox. Of it, he says : 

"The leading contestants in this debate were two 
Senators of very different types. The Senator 
from Wisconsin, Timothy O. Howe, was in the 
same class of the genus homo as William H. Sew- 
ard and Simon Cameron. He was tall, thin, pallid 
as death and immovable in his restful and unimpas- 
sioned habitudes. How unlike the sturdy and fervid 
Marylander, Reverdy Johnson, who so triumphantly 
replied to his dialectics. Other men have been more 
praised than Timothy O Howe, but other men 
never deserved more encomium than he from his 
side of this great argument. But when the Mary- 
lander brought his interrogative skill into the arena, 
his rapier pierced the heart of the contention at 
every thrust. The parrying of the Wisconsin Sena- 



190 Maryland in National Politics. 

tor was adroit, but the cunning fence and the cour- 
age of conviction of the Marylander were resistless. 

"To complete the surroundings of such a moment- 
ous contest, one would wish for the picturesque pen- 
cil of Macauley. There is no equal for graphic 
style of that scene in the High Court of Parliament, 
when the Peers sat in the great hall of William Rufus 
*to try an Englishman for tyranny over the holy 
city of Benares, over the ladies of the princely house 
of Oude.' True, no such garniture of traditions 
had gathered about the new Senate Chamber, but 
here in our State House the fate, the condition, the 
contumacy and the so-called crime of many republics 
is in grand inquest. Members of the House of Rep- 
resentatives, since eminent at home and abroad, 
flocked to the Senate to hear Senator Johnson reply 
to the superb speech made the day before by the Wis- 
consin Senator. The prayer is offered ; the journal 
is read; petitioners, reports, bills and a dull debate 
about assessors are listened to impatiently. Some 
words from Senator Anthony are heard, then a vote 
is had. Now a sharp rap is heard from the Presi- 
dent Pro-Tempore. He calls up the great problem 
of the provisional government and of the vitality 
of the States. The Senators settle themselves in 
their chairs. They are intent to catch each syllable. 
On the left of the chair sit the few Democrats re- 
maining in that august body. Buckalew, Hendricks, 
Nesmith, Garrett, Davis, Stockton and Guthrie are 
about all of the old party regulars left. But what 
new Senators are these, now anxiously waiting to 
hear the accents of the grand Marylander? Doo- 
little. Brown, Dixon, Cowan and Trumbull, so soon 
to become giants in those fierce and fervent days, 
are ready to accept the new situation as champions 
of Andrew Johnson's administration for the unim- 
paired energy of Statehood. Senator Johnson's re- 



Maryland in National Politics. 191 

ply was a masterly elucidation. It set forth the 
Democratic doctrine respecting the constitutional 
status of the States that had attempted to secede 
from the Union and must appear unanswerable to 
every unprejudiced reader." 

Johnson had broken with the Lincoln ad- 
ministration soon after he entered the Senate. 
He could not tolerate the crimes that were 
committed in Lincoln's name, and went bodily 
over to the Democratic party. His condem- 
nation of the reign of militarism is shown in 
his appearances before the Supreme Court 
against the practices of the satraps of the 
Stanton regime. After Lincoln's death and 
Andrew Johnson's succession to the Presiden- 
cy, the Senator favored strongly the new ad- 
ministration's plan of reconstruction. It was 
in defence of this plan that he met and de- 
feated Howe in the debate just referred to. 
Moreover, the Marylander upheld the power 
of removal from office which the President 
refused to surrender and the exercise of which, 
in defiance of Congress, resulted in the im- 
peachment proceedings. 

Senator Johnson was the President's savior 
in this the most momentous trial, civil or crim- 
inal, in American history. From first to last 
the burden of the Executive's acquittal rested 
upon the willing shoulders of the Maryland 



192 Maryland in National Politics. 

statesman. It was he who led the fight against 
Senator Wade's participation in the vote. It 
was he who, when Senator Grimes wavered 
out of fear that the President if left in office 
would commit some rash act, arranged a pri- 
vate conference between Johnson and Grimes 
that brought three doubtful members into line. 
It was he who filed an opinion with the Sen- 
ate in defence of Johnson, to which no conclu- 
sive answer was ever made. 

And when the crucial vote arrived on the 
first article of the impeachment, it was Rever- 
dy Johnson who produced from a sick bed the 
one vote needed to prevent a verdict against 
the President. Senator Grimes was not on 
the floor of the Senate when the roll-call was 
ordered. It was known that he was ill, and 
for a brief moment it seemed that the case of 
the defence was hopelessly lost. The fact of 
Grimes' absence was noted, but Senator John- 
son suddenly rose in his seat, declaring: "The 
Senator is here. I have sent for him. He is 
now downstairs. He will be here in a mo- 
ment. He is here." And in a moment the 
sick man reached the chamber — reached it in 
time to cast the nineteenth vote against convic- 
tion. That vote saved Andrew Johnson. 

A year later Charles Francis Adams asked 
for his recall as Minister to Great Britain, 



Maryland in National Politics. 193 

and immediately the President appointed 
Johnson to the vacant post. He was unani- 
mously confirmed, proceeding without delay 
to London with a commission to negotiate 
three treaties with England, viz. : One grant- 
ing to the United States the right to naturalize 
Britishsubjects ; anotherdefining the boundary 
between Vancouver's Island and the United 
States, and a third providing for an adjustment 
of all claims arising out of Britain's failure to 
remain neutral during the Civil War. 

Johnson's diplomatic mission was not for- 
tunate. He was now beyond the age of 70 
years and, while still robust of mind and 
vigorous of body, he had undoubtedly seen his 
best days. His Alabama Claims treaty was 
wholly unsatisfactory to the Senate and was 
rejected after an unfavorable report had been 
unanimously made by the Foreign Relations 
Committee. He retired from London shortly 
after Grant's inauguration, bringing his long 
record of public service to a close. 

While on a visit to Governor Carroll at An- 
napolis, early in 1876, Johnson fell from an 
open window in the Executive Mansion and 
when found was dead from a fractured skull. 
His death removed one of the strongest char- 
acters Maryland has even given to the country 
— a giant at the bar and in the forum, a Roman 
worthy of any State. 

18 



194 Maryland in National Politics. 



HENRY WINTER DAVIS 

1817— 1865 

It is a happy commentary upon our system 
of government that the nation has found lead- 
ership of ample strength to cope with every 
crisis through which it has passed. The emer- 
gency and the relief, the problem and the solu- 
tion, the hour and the man have never failed 
to meet. 

This has never been more pronounced than 
in the deadly struggle between the States 
That war, which for four long, tragic years 
threatened the disruption of the American 
Union, not only developed a longer line of 
military genius than any civil conflict in all 
history, but it brought into relief a type of 
statesmanship as virile as this or any other 
country has ever given to the world. 

The Republic owes an incalculable debt to 
the martial heroes of the Civil War, but it 
owes no less an obligation to that body of men 
who, in the halls of Congress and in the execu- 
tive departments, battled as honorably and as 
bravely to save the Union from suicide. With- 
out their determination and their patriotic 



Maryland in National Politics. 195 

support the victories which the armies achiev 
ed in the field would have been impossible. 

Thousands there were who sacrificed their 
lives to maintain a principle. Other thou- 
sands, removed from the scenes of blood and 
agony and death, labored with feverish energy 
to the same end. But from first to last, the 
cause of the Union had no bolder defender, no 
more fearless tribune than Henry Winter 
Davis. He dedicated to that cause an intel- 
lect sweeping in its splendor, and a voice as 
fervidly eloquent as any ever raised in a legis- 
lative body. 

The career of this Marylander was meteoric 
in its brilliancy. Eight short years of Con- 
gressional service elevated him from a posi- 
tion of obscurity to that of the most dangerous 
debater and the most gifted orator in the land. 
Had he been blessed with length of days he 
would, in the judgment of no less an authority 
than James G. Blaine, "have left the most 
splendid name in the parliamentary annals of 
America." 

One of the organizers of the American 
party, Davis was first elected to the House of 
Representatives in 1854 "po" that ticket. He 
was re-elected in 1856 and in 1858. He re- 
turned to that body for two years in 1863. A 
Southern man, he faithfully championed the 



196 Maryland in National Politics. 

interests of the South until those interests re- 
solved upon dismemberment. From that hour 
he became the arch-enemy of secession and se- 
cessionists, devoting himself with impassioned 
zeal to the preservation of the Union. 

To Davis, above all other men, was due 
Maryland's loyalty during this reign of disor- 
der and distraction. His relentless campaign 
in that State against disunion called forth a 
vote of bitter censure from the Democratic 
Legislature. He replied in an address, "which 
for eloquence, force and conclusiveness of rea- 
soning is entitled to rank in the political clas- 
sics of America as the Address to the Electors 
of Bristol ranks in the political classics of 
England." 

Though a Unionist, uncompromising and 
unconqerable, Davis was, in the House, as pas- 
sionate an advocate of civil liberty as was his 
colleague, Reverdy Johnson, in the Senate. 
He inveighed with a tongue of fire against 
the tyranny of militarism and the abuse of 
power by an autocratic regime. Nor did he 
hesitate, while restoration was in progress, to 
defy the great Lincoln himself, when, as Chair- 
man of the Committee on Rebellious States, he 
denounced the President's Reconstruction 
Proclamation "as a blow at the friends of the 



Maryland in National Politics. 197 

administration, at the rights of humanity, and 
at the principles of republican government." 



In many respects the early life of Henry 
Winter Davis was a counterpart of that of 
another distinguished Southern Marylander, 
William Wirt. Each of them was left an or- 
phan before the age of maturity; each received 
his education through the sacrifices of kindly 
relatives; each began the practice of law in 
Virginia, and each, by reason of an attractive 
personality and a certain warmth of good-fel- 
lowship, surrounded himself with a group of 
devoted admirers. Here the parallel ends, 
however. Wirt remained in Virginia until 
he had written his name in bold letters across 
the history of his country. Davis soon re- 
turned to Maryland soil to establish himself 
at the Baltimore bar, and from there to enter 
the Congress of the United States. 

It is a rather remarkable circumstance that 
Davis held but one political office during his 
life, and perhaps more remarkable that he was 
a candidate for but one. His friends urged 
him for the United States Senate when Rever- 
dy Johnson was elected in 1863, but there is 
no record that the younger man gave any en- 
couragement to the movement. He was con- 



198 Maryland in National Politics. 

tent to build his monument in the House of 
Representatives. And the monument he reared 
is one that will endure as long as men do honor 
to intellectual prowess or revere patriotic en- 
deavor. 

Many able Marylanders have attained high 
station in the lower house of Congress. Nich- 
olson, Chapman, Samuel Smith, Mercer, Du- 
vall, Kent, Bowie, Pinkney, McLane, Cal- 
vert, Creswell, Swann, McComas, Rayner and 
many others were given conspicuous rank 
there, yet none of them enjoyed the power 
wielded in his day by Henry Winter Davis. 
By the force of his leadership the law of the 
nation was in a large measure molded, and 
by the same token his was the only name of a 
Maryland statesman ever placed in nomina- 
tion for Speakership of that body. 

Shortly after Davis removed to Baltimore 
in 1850 he allied himself with the Whig party 
and made a series of speeches in the Scott cam^ 
paign of 1852. This old but ill-fated organi- 
zation was soon to pass. It had weathered 
many storms and suffered many defeats. It 
had failed to keep abreast of the new issues 
which were forcing themselves upon the at- 
tention of the people, and was soon gathered 
to the fathers. 



Maryland in National Politics. 199 

Upon the ruins of the Whig party there rose 
a new order. The Native American party, 
afterward the American, and still later known 
as the Know-Nothing organization, enjoyed 
a period of widespread popularity immedi- 
ately preceding the rise of Republicanism. 
This movement was sporadic and, like anti- 
Masonry, '^its soap-bubble burst in the efifort 
to blow up to the size of a Presidential fac- 
tor." During its brief career, however, it 
served as a refuge for a large fraction of the 
people who opposed Democracy, who had lost 
faith in the Whigs and who were not bold 
enough to unite with the Republicans — people 
who were, in efifect, political orphans. 

In the beginning, that is, about 1843, ^^^ 
Native American party had its birth in the 
municipal contests of New York and Phila- 
delphia. They revived the bitter spirit of in- 
tolerance against the Roman Catholic Church 
and organized themselves into secret bodies to 
oppose all foreigners who ventured into poli- 
tics. Outrages were committed against the 
Catholic church in half a dozen cities; priests 
were hounded, and even the sanctity of nun- 
neries was violated. 

The early plan of the Native Americans 
was to pick candidates of the older parties for 
support. As the movement spread and gained 



200 Maryland in National Politics. 

strength, however, a "council" of local lodges 
was authorized to name regular party tickets. 
As early as 1845 the Native Americans elected 
Lewis Charles Levin a member of Congress 
from Philadelphia. By 1850 the Native Amer- 
icans were strongly intrenched in such cities 
as New York, Baltimore, New Orleans and 
Cincinnati, and were pushing a well-defined 
propaganda. 

Two years later Henry Winter Davis and a 
few bold spirits went over to the Native Amer- 
icans, changed the name to the American party, 
and at once proceeded to nationalize it. By 
reason of the secrecy of the organization and 
the refusal of its members to discuss its plansor 
principles, the party became commonly known 
as Know-Nothings, a title that pursued it until 
its end. 

Davis' affiliation with the Know-Nothings 
was undoubtedly influenced by the broader 
purposes which the party comprehended at 
this time. The Grand Council at its Cincin 
nati meeting had resolved that the American 
followers should be neither pro-slavery nor 
anti-slavery; that the party should stand ir- 
revocably for the Union; that it should have 
no geographical limitations, and that it should 
appeal to the conservatives of the North and 
South alike. Such a position coincided exact- 



Maryland in National Politics. 201 

ly with the early views of Davis. He was op- 
posed to slavery as an institution, but did not 
believe it could be abolished in America 
through the medium of any political party or 
political revolution. Radicalism, he believed, 
would divide the States and end in war. 

For these reasons Davis plunged with en- 
thusiasm into the reorganization of the Native 
Americans. In 1854 ^he new order achieved 
notable successes, particularly in Massachu- 
setts and Delaware. Henry J. Gardner was 
elected Governor of the Bay State, the first 
State-wide fight which the new party had won. 
A similar victory crowned their campaign in 
Delaware. Fusion in New York prevented 
the Know-Nothings from winning there. Pol 
lock was, however, elected on a combination 
Know-Nothing and Whig ticket in Pennsyl- 
vania, and in many other States the Americans 
triumphed in local fights. 

The results of the 1854 campaign fired the 
ambition of the Know-Nothing organization. 
The leaders of the party believed that it was 
one of destiny, and immediately laid their 
plans to capture the Presidency in 1856. Fill- 
more, Houston, Clayton and Bell were brought 
forward as possible candidates. Thousands of 
old Whigs rushed to its standard. Other thou- 
sands of Southerners, who feared the rise of 



202 Maryland in National Politics. 

the new Republican party or distrusted the 
friendship of the Northern Democrats, went 
over to Know-Nothingism as a shelter in a na- 
tional emergency. 

The rising tide of the new party continued 
through the spring elections of 1855. Even 
New Hampshire, President Pierce's own 
State, elected an American party candidate 
Governor. Connecticut did the same thing, 
as did Rhode Island. The Free Soil party in 
many sections amalgamated with Americans, 
while in both Maryland and Virginia the 
strength of the new party was manifest in the 
local campaigns. 

In February, 1855, the Know-Nothings held 
their first national convention in Pittsburgh. 
Millard Fillmore was nominated for the Pres- 
idency and Andrew J. Donelson, of Tennes- 
see, for the Vice-Presidency. The only plat- 
form or public announcement that was made 
was contained in the slogan, ^'America for 
Americans." The Democrats nominated Bu- 
chanan, and the Republicans Fremont, in the 
same year. The failure of the Know-Noth- 
ings to take a stand upon the slavery issue 
proved fatal to the hopes of their leaders. Bu- 
chanan was overwhelmingly elected, Mary- 
land alone casting its electoral vote for Fill- 
more. 



Maryland in National Politics. 203 

The victory in Maryland for the American 
party was the result in large measure of the 
brilliant campaign made by Henry Winter 
Davis. He had been elected to Congress the 
first time two years before, as a Know-Noth- 
ing, and was himself a candidate a second time 
on the same ticket. He was the party's recog- 
nized leader in the State, and his success in 
capturing it for Fillmore gave him a promi- 
nence that was nation-wide. He himself was 
re-elected by an increased majority, becoming 
at once the leader of the Know-Nothings in 
the House and their candidate for the Speak- 
ership. 

With the defeat of Fillmore in 1856 the de- 
cline of the American party began. The pas- 
sions of the people had been so aroused over 
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and 
the Kansas-Nebraska feud that no political 
organization without convictions upon the 
slavery question could survive. This issue be- 
came paramount to all others, regardless of 
the pacific attitude of Buchanan and the broad 
nationalism upon which he projected his ad- 
ministration. The Know-Nothing organiza- 
tion lived through one more campaign, in 
which Davis was for a third time elected to 
the House. Then it evaporated. 



204 Maryland in National Politics. 

Davis' work in the Thirty-fourth and Thir- 
ty-fifth Congresses was important only as it 
prepared him for bigger and finer service in 
later years. Almost immediately after his 
first election he leaped to the forefront of the 
House membership as an orator. "He boldly 
presented himself before the most rigorous 
tribunal in the world, and he proved himself 
worthy of its favor and its attention." When 
he addressed the House he filled every gallery 
and every seat on the floor. He hoped in vain 
for some peaceful solution for the problems 
which centered about the slavery issue, and his 
appeals for moderation in approaching the 
crisis were worthy of the best days of the Re- 
public. 

It was in the second session of the Thirty- 
sixth Congress that Davis became a most im- 
portant factor. By that time the nation was 
in a state of acute alarm. The winds of dis- 
sension had been sown and the whirlwinds 
were soon to be reaped. The clouds of civil 
war were lowering, dark with ominous warn- 
ing. President Buchanan had sent in his fa- 
mous message, declaring that the national gov- 
ernment had no power to coerce a State. The 
South was daring in its demands for a com- 
plete surrender of all opposition to slavery. 
The North was determined and uncompromis- 



Maryland in National Politics. 205 

ing in its purpose to resist such surrender. In 
this deadlock, secession once more raised its 
head. 

The strong men of each house of Congress 
realized that the situation was desperate. 
They felt that any expedient was justified that 
would conciliate the South, on the one hand, 
and placate the North, on the other. And in 
a last hope of saving the Union, without resort 
to arms, special committees were raised in 
both the House and Senate. In the House 
the Committee of Thirty-three was named, 
upon which sat the ablest man from each 
State. Henry Winter Davis represented 
Maryland. A series of compromises and con- 
cessions was proposed by this body. They 
were, however, as ill-fated as were every other 
movement designed to appease the wrath of 
the two sections. 

Davis supported the report of this com- 
mittee in one of the ablest speeches in his ca- 
reer. It was, however, a speech that raised a 
storm of protest in Maryland and one, because 
of its audacity and fearlessly proclaimed mili- 
tancy, cost the orator his seat in Congress and 
threatened for a time to bring his political 
life to an untimely end. In the course of this 
address Davis said: 



2o6 Maryland in National Politics. 

"I do not wish to say one word which will exas- 
perate the already too much inflamed state of public 
mind, but I will say that the Constitution of the 
United States, and the laws made in pursuance 
thereof, must be enforced; and they who stand across 
the path of that enforcement must either destroy the 
pozver of the United States, or it will destroy them. 

"But, sir, there is one State that I can speak for, 
and that is the State of Maryland. Confident in the 
strength of this great government to protect every 
interest, grateful for almost a century of unalloyed 
blessings, she has fomented no agitation; she has 
done no act to disturb the public peace, she has rested 
in the consciousness that if there be wrong, the Con- 
egress of the United States will remedy it, and that 
-none exists which revolution would not aggravate. 

"But, Mr. Speaker, I am here this day to speak, 
and I say that I do speak for the people of Maryland, 
who are loyal to the United States. When my 
judgment is contested, I appeal to the people for its 
accuracy, and I am ready to maintain it before them. 

"In Maryland we are dull and cannot comprehend 
the right of secession. We do not recognize the 
right to make a revolution by a vote. We do not 
recognize the right of Maryland to repeal the Con- 
stitution of the United States ; and if any convention 
there, called by whatever authority, under whatever 
auspices, undertakes to inaugurate a revolution in 
Maryland, its authority will be resisted and defied 
in arms on the soil of Maryland, in the name and by 
the authority of the United States." 

In this speech Davis had declared that the 
people of Maryland were loyal and he had 
given his pledge to maintain that loyalty. And 
the occasion soon came for him to redeem that 



Maryland in National Politics. 207 

pledge. In January, 1861, the flag of the 
United States was fired upon. In February 
Jefferson Davis announced that war was in- 
evitable. On March 4 Lincoln was inaugu- 
rated, and in his inaugural address issued his 
final appeal to the South. On April 14 the 
President issued a proclamation calling for an 
extra session of Congress. This rendered a 
special election in Maryland necessary, and 
before the end of that day Henry Winter 
Davis issued the following announcement: 

"To the Voters of the Fourth Congressional Dis- 
trict of Maryland : 

"I hereby announce myself as a candidate for the 
House of Representatives of the Thirty-Seventh Con- 
gress of the United States of America, upon the 
basis of the unconditional maintenance of the Union. 
Should my fellow-citizens of like views manifest 
their preference for a different candidate on that 
basis, it is not my purpose to embarrass them." 

The contest then inaugurated was one of the 
most memorable in the history of the State. 
Henry May, upon a Conservative Union plat- 
form, opposed him. "In the face of an oppo- 
sition," said Senator Creswell a few years 
afterward, "which few men have dared to en- 
counter, he carried on, unremittingly from 
that time until the election on the 13th of June, 
the most brilliant campaign against open trai- 
tors, doubters and dodgers, that unrivaled elo- 



2o8 Maryland in National Politics. 

quence, courage and activity could achieve. 
Everywhere, day and night, in sunshine and 
storm, in the market-house, at the street cor- 
ners and in the public halls his voice rang out 
clear, loud and defiant for the 'unconditional 
maintenance of the Union.' He was defeated, 
but he sanctified the name of unconditional 
Union in the vocabulary of every true Mary- 
lander." He gathered 6,000 votes out of 
14,000, and exclaimed to a friend that "with 
6,000 of the workingmen of Baltimore on my 
side, won in such a contest, I defy them to take 
the State out of the Union." 

Though defeated, Davis was not deterred in 
his efforts to keep his State in the loyal col- 
umn. He prosecuted his fight month by 
month, county by county, in season and out. 
In a speech delivered at this time in Brook- 
lyn, New York, he said: "You see the confla- 
gration from a distance; it blisters me at my 
side. You can survive the integrity of the na- 
tion; we in Maryland would live on the side 
of a gulf, perpetually tending to plunge into 
its depths. It is for us life and liberty; it is 
for you greatness, strength and prosperity." 
In answer to taunts from the Southern sympa- 
thizers over the battle of Bull Run, Davis, in 
one of his speeches, said: "The War Depart- 
ment has been taught much by misfortune at 



Maryland in National Politics. 209 

Bull Run, a misfortune which has broken no 
power nor any spirit, which has bowed no 
State nor made any heart falter, which was 
felt as a humiliation that has brought forth 
wisdom." Referring to the rebels in the State 
and foretelling his own fate, if they won the 
day, he said: "They have inaugurated an era 
of confiscation, proscriptions and exiles. Read 
their acts of greedy confiscation, their law of 
proscriptions by the thousands. Behold the 
flying exiles from the unfriendly soil of Vir- 
ginia, Tennessee and Missouri!" 

During the two years Davis was out of pub- 
lic office he successfully waged the fight to 
hold his State in the Union, and the even 
harder fight for the emancipation of slavery. 
He made a second series of ringing speeches 
all over the State, and headed the Uncondi- 
tional Union-emancipation forces through the 
Legislature which had previously denounced 
him because of his speech in Congress, through 
the contest for delegates to the Constitutional 
Convention, through the fight for the adoption 
of the Constitution proposed by the conven- 
tion, and lastly through the Court of Appeals, 
before which tribunal the whole proceeding 
was contested. In every move he was trium- 
phant, and in 1863 his State, without serious 

14 



2IO Maryland in National Politics. 

opposition, sent him back to the federal House 
of Representatives. 

The two years following this election were 
crowned with Davis' most conspicuous work 
as a legislator. He allied himself with the Re- 
publican majority, and as head of the Commit- 
tee on Rebellious States dealt with the most 
important problems of the time. He fathered 
the ''one-tenth" plan of reconstruction, also an 
amnesty proposal which mitigated the severity 
of the test-oath. And though he stood stanch- 
ly with the majority in many of the fiercest 
contests in Congress, he ranged himself square- 
ly against the administration when he found 
the dominant element in the wrong. This in- 
dependent attitude was shown with great force 
in the fight against the military incarceration 
of loyal citizens. This was the most dramatic 
situation in which Davis figured as a leader of 
the House. 

The question of incarceration came up in 
the second session of this Congress upon a res- 
olution directing the Committee on Military 
Affairs to find out why hundreds of peaceful 
citizens were held in the Old Capitol and in 
the Carroll prisons upon the mere order of the 
Solicitor of the Treasury. The resolution 
passed. Taken by surprise, Thaddeus Stevens 
moved to reconsider. A violent debate there- 



Maryland in National Politics. 211 

upon followed. Henry Winter Davis then 
took the floor. "He placed the matter on the 
highest ground," says ''Sunset" Cox in his 
"Three Decades of Federal Legislation." 
Continuing, Cox says of Davis: 

"He demanded that the committee examine the 
facts and spread them before the American people 
and let them say whether there exists any law that 
authorizes the confinement of any American citizen 
not in the military service, in a loyal State, upon the 
judgment of a military commission, or, without judi- 
cial sanction, at the pleasure of subordinate officers 
of the government, or even by order of the Presi- 
dent himself. 

"This was bold ground," continues Cox. "It is 
worthy of the parliamentary heroism in the time of 
the Stuarts and their prerogative. It was auda- 
cious, especially for a member of the dominant and 
arrogant party. General Garfield raised his voice 
in indignant protest. He, too, was hailed as a 
friend of civil liberty. The debate had taken even 
more significent form at the beginning of the session. 
Henry Winter Davis rose then to the height of a 
grand argument in favor 'of the right of every citi- 
zen to his personal liberty.' It was he who had 
offered the section cited by General Garfield in the 
Milligan case as an amendment declaratory of our 
Bill of Rights. He held that on it depended the 
very endurance of republican institutions. When 
the bill came back from the Senate without that 
section, Davis said that no money should be appro- 
pirated with his consent, at the expense of so grave 
a reflection upon the fundamental principles of the 
government. This was the climax of a long debate 
and came not a half -hour before the death of that 



212 Maryland in National Politics. 

Congress. The wildest passions were rife. The 
bill failed. Henry Winter Davis scorned to yield 
even for the passage of some charities in it. Amidst 
the wildest applause the three years of arbitrary ar- 
rogance and flagrant violation of our Magna Charta 
was buried beneath the reprobation of the American 
House of Representatives. What a triumph an 
earnest, liberty-loving minority may achieve, if 
bravely led and inspired with a profound and in- 
telligent love of liberty!" 

It was about this time that Davis delivered 
what is regarded by many of his contemporar- 
ies as the greatest speech of his life. The 
Union armies had failed time and again to 
take Richmond or to maneuver successfully 
against Lee's strategy. Hundreds of thou- 
sands of lives had been sacrificed in a vain at- 
tempt to crush the rebellion. It was evident 
that this end could only be accomplished at 
the cost of another ocean of human blood. As 
a consequence, a call was made on the floor of 
the American Congress for a recognition of 
the Southern Confederacy, a surrender. Davis' 
vibrant answer to this proposal was, in part, 
as follows: 

"But if it be said that a time may come when the 
question of recognizing the Southern Confederacy 
will have to be answered, I admit it. When the 
people, exhausted by taxation, weary of sacrifices, 
drained of blood, betrayed by their rulers, deluded 
by demagogues into believing that peace is the way 
to union, and submission the path to victory, shall 



Maryland in National Politics. 213 

throw down their arms before the advancing foe; 
when vast chasms across every State shall make it 
apparent to every eye, when too late to remedy it, 
that division from the South is anarchy at the 
North, and that peace without Union is the end of 
the repulic, then the independence of the South will 
be an accomplished fact, and gentlemen may, with- 
out treason to the dead republic, rise in this mi- 
gratory House, wherever it may then be in America, 
and declare themselves for recognizing their masters 
at the South rather than exterminating them. Un- 
til that day, in the name of the American nation, in 
the name of every house in the land where there is 
one dead for the holy cause, in the name of those 
who stand before us in the ranks of battle, in the 
name of the liberty our ancestors have confided to us, 
I devote to eternal execration the name of him who 
shall propose to destroy this blessed land rather than 
its enemies. 

"But, until that time arrive, it is the judgment of 
the American people there shall be no compromise; 
that ruin to ourselves or ruin to the Southern rebels 
are the only alternatives. It is only by resolutions 
of this kind that nations can rise above great dan- 
gers and overcome them in crises like this. It was 
only by turning France into a camp, resolved that 
Europe might exterminate, but should not subjugate 
her, that France is the leading empire of Europe 
today. It is by such a resolve that the American 
people, coercing a reluctant government to draw the 
sword and stake the national existence on the integ- 
rity of the republic, are now anything but the frag- 
ments of a nation before the world, the scorn and 
hiss of every petty tyrant. It is because the people 
of the United States, rising to the height of the occa- 
sion, dedicated this generation to the sword and 
pouring out the blood of their children as of no ac- 



214 Maryland in National Politics. 

count, and vowing before high heaven that there 
should be no end to this conflict but ruin absolute 
or absolute triumph, that we now are what we are; 
that the banner of the republic, still pointing onward, 
floats proudly in the face of the enemy; that vast 
regions are reduced to obedience to the laws, and 
that a great host in armed array now press with 
steady step into the dark regions of the rebellion. 

"It is only by earnest and abiding resolution of the 
people that, whatever shall be our fate, it shall be 
grand as the American nation, worthy of that re- 
public which first trod the path of empire and made 
no peace but under the banners of victory, that the 
American people will survive in history. And that 
will save us. We shall succeed, and not fail. I 
have an abiding confidence in the firmness, the 
patience, the endurance of the American people; and, 
having vowed to stand in history on the great resolve 
to accept nothing but victory or ruin, victory is 
ours. And if with such heroic resolve we fail, we 
fail with honor, and transmit the name of liberty, 
committed to our keeping, untarnished, to future 
generations. 

"The historian of our decHne and fall, contem- 
plating the ruins of the last great republic and draw- 
ing from its fate lessons of wisdom on the way- 
wardness of men, shall drop a tear as he records with 
sorrow the vain heroism of that people who dedicated 
and sacrificed themselves to the cause of freedom, 
and by their example will keep alive her worship 
in the hearts of men till happier generations shall 
learn to walk in her paths. Yes, sir, if we must 
fall, let our last hours be stained by no weakness. If 
we must fall, let us stand amid the crash of the falling- 
republic and be buried in its ruins, so that history may 
take note that men lived in the middle of the nine- 
teenth century worthy of a better fate, but chastised 



Maryland in National Politics. 215 

by God for the sins of their forefathers. Let the 
ruins of the repubHc remain to testify to the latest 
generations our greatness and our heroism. And let 
liberty, crownless and childless, sit upon these ruins, 
crying aloud in a sad wail to the nations of the 
earth, 'I nursed and brought up children, and they 
have rebelled against me.' " 

Davis' fearlessness in denouncing Lincoln's 
Reconstruction Proclamation created a most 
profound sensation. The Marylander had 
proposed the one-tenth policy of suffrage in 
the returning States, a policy of permitting 
one-tenth of the population in the South to 
reorganize their Commonwealths and again 
place them in their proper relation to the 
Union. This he later abandoned, urging that 
only a majority vote should control. He gave 
his support to a bill which the President had 
vetoed, providing for such a plan. As soon 
as Congress adjourned Lincoln issued a proc- 
lamation based upon the one-tenth proposal 
and otherwise operating counter to the ex- 
pressed will of Congress. This action by the 
Executive resulted in a vehement protest writ- 
ten by Davis and signed by him and Senator 
Wade, the Chairmen of the House and Senate 
Committees on Rebellious States. This pro- 
test was a powerful arraignment of the admin- 
istration. It said in part: 



2i6 Maryland in National Politics. 

"The bill requires a majority of voters to establish 
a State government, the proclamation is satisfied 
with one-tenth ; the bill requires one oath, the procla- 
mation another ; the bill ascertains voters by register- 
ing, the proclamation by guess ; the bill exacts adher- 
ence to existing territorial limits, the proclamation 
admits of others; the bill governs the rebellious 
States by law equalizing all before it; the procla- 
mation commits them to the lawless discretion of 
military governors and provost marshals; the bill 
forbids electors for President (in the rebel States), 
the proclamation with the defeat of the bill threatens 
us with civil war for the exclusion of such votes. 
This proclamation is rash and fatal, a blow at the 
friends of the administration, at the rights of hu- 
manity, and the principles of republican government. 
The support of the Republican party is committed to 
a cause and not to a man. The authority of Con- 
gress is paramount and must be respected, and the 
whole body of Union men in Congress will not sub- 
mit to be impeached by the President of rash and 
unconstitutional legislation. He must confine him- 
self to his executive duties — to obey and execute, 
not make laws. He must suppress armed rebellion 
by arms and leave political reorganization to Con- 
gress." 

But few men have ever lived who were able 
to make history long years after their death, 
yet Henry Winter Davis was so privileged. 
His name, by an odd circumstance, was 
brought into the Blaine-Conkling controversy, 
the most savage personal conflict in the annals 
of Congress. Blaine's violent assault upon 
Conkling rankled in the heart of the New 



Maryland in National Politics. 217 

Yorker to the end of his days. His revenge 
came in 1883, when he boldly aided in deliver- 
ing the Empire State to Grover Cleveland, 
forever blasting the Presidential hopes of the 
great statesman from Maine. The innocent 
and posthumous part played by the Mary- 
lander in this drama of politics may be indi- 
cated by the following extract from Blaine's 
famous rejoinder: 

"As to Mr. Conkling's sarcasm, I hope that he 
will not be too severe. The contempt of that large- 
minded gentleman is so wilting ; his haughty disdain, 
his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, 
overpowering turkey-gobbler strut has been so crush- 
ing to myself and all the members of this House that 
I know it was an act of greatest temerity for me to 
venture upon a controversy with him. But, sir, I 
know who is responsible for all this. I know that 
within the past five weeks, as members of the House 
will recollect, an extra strut has characterized the 
gentleman's bearing. It was not his fault. It was 
the fault of another. That gifted and satirical 
writer, Theodore Tilton, of the New York Inde- 
pendent, spent some weeks recently in this city. 
His letters published in that paper embraced, with 
many serious statements, a little satire, a part of 
which was the statement that the mantle of the late 
Henry Winter Davis had fallen upon the member 
from New York. This gentleman took it seriously, 
and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The 
resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to 
a satyr; Thersitis to Hercules; mud to marble; 
dunghill to diamond; a singed cat to a Bengal tiger; 
a whining puppy to a roaring lion. Shade of the 



2i8 Maryland in National Politics. 

mighty Davis, forgive the profanation of that jocose 
satire!" 

The death of Davis in 1865, nine months 
after he had retired from the House, was a 
stunning shock to the whole nation. He had 
just reached his prime and was looked upon 
by leaders of all parties as the most promising 
man developed by the legislative problems of 
the Civil War. As a measure of expression 
of this national bereavement, the two houses 
of Congress united in a memorial service to 
the dead statesman, a service never before nor 
since accorded to a private citizen. The House 
on February 22 adopted resolutions of grief 
and invited the Senate to join in the tribute. 
At twelve o'clock on that day the Senate in a 
body entered the chamber of the House, fol- 
lowed by the Judges of the Supreme Court, 
headed by Chief Justice Chase. Members of 
the Cabinet and the Diplomatic Corps occu- 
pied the reserved galleries. The public gal- 
leries were thronged with people. The flags 
above the Speaker's chair were draped in 
black and other insignia of mourning were 
exhibited. A portrait of Davis was visible 
through the folds of the national banner. The 
Marine Band occupied the press gallery and 
discoursed dirges during the proceedings. 
After the reading of the Declaration of Inde- 



Maryland in National Politics. 219 

pendence, Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the 
House, pronounced a brief eulogy, then intro- 
duced Senator J. A, J. Creswell, of Maryland, 
who delivered an oration upon the life and 
public services of the deceased. 



220 Maryland in National Politics. 



MONTGOMERY BLAIR 

1813-1883 

Of that group of eminent Marylanders 
whose service to their country. distinguished 
them during the fateful period of the Civil 
War, only one lived to see their labors and 
their sacrifices maturely fructify. Only one 
lived to see the disrupted Union completely 
reconstructed, to see the slave given both his 
freedom and his citizenship, to see the South 
participate once more in the councils of the 
Republic, to see the enemies of a thousand bat- 
tlefields living again in peace and fraternity. 

Roger B. Taney died in 1864, with the issue 
of war still undetermined. Henry Winter 
Davis passed away in 1865, while the low 
thunder of conflict yet echoed throughout the 
land. Reverdy Johnson survived Lee's Sur- 
render by ten years, but he did not survive the 
angry passions following in the wake of that 
surrender. Montgomery Blair alone lingered 
upon the scene long enough to witness the 
withdrawal from the South of the last armed 
guard and the restoration of the last seceding 
State to its proper relation in the sisterhood of 
American Commonwealths. 

For thirty years this Maryland statesman 



Maryland in National Politics. 221 

and lawyer was a conspicuous figure in the 
vital affairs of the nation. From the begin- 
ning of his residence in the State, in 1853, until 
his death in 1883, his career was intimately as- 
sociated with the dramatic events of those 
three decades. First a Democrat, then an 
American, afterward a Republican and, final- 
ly, a Democrat again, he represented a type of 
militant independence that made him a verit- 
able storm centre in politics, and his name a 
perpetual challenge to the rampant radicalism 
of all parties. 

An hereditary follower of Jacksonian De- 
mocracy, Blair gave adherence to that political 
faith as long as it stood for the inviolable 
preservation of the Union. When, in the 
course of time, this ancient organization be- 
came the defender of slavery and the friend 
of sectionalism, he abandoned it and engaged 
actively in the formation of the Republican 
party. He sat as a delegate in the convention 
that nominated Fremont in 1856, and cast the 
vote of his State four years later for the nomi- 
nation of Abraham Lincoln. 

Because of his devotion to the Union, Blair 
was rewardedwith the Postmaster-Generalship 
in Lincoln's Cabinet. For three years and a 
half he sat at the right hand of the great War 
President, a loyal member of the most historic 



222 Maryland in National Politics. 

ministry in our national annals. When, how- 
ever, his presence in that official household 
became embarssing to the Executive, threat- 
ening to defeat Lincoln's re-election, the 
Marylander withdrew, a willing sacrifice to 
the interest of his friend and to the cause 
which his friend embodied. 

Unable to associate himself with the destruc- 
tion of the State sovereignty as opposed to the 
reconstruction policy of the lamented Lincoln, 
Blair once more changed his political alle- 
giance, casting his fortunes with the conserva- 
tive Democrats. As a leader of that element, 
he took part in the formation of a new consti- 
tution for his State, demanding of the conven- 
tion the re-enfranchisement of every loyal 
white man of Maryland. 

Turning again to national politics, Blair 
supported the nomination of Horace Greely 
in 1868. After that ill-fated candidate was 
buried beneath an avalanche of votes, he be- 
came the friend and champion of Samuel J. 
Tilden. He led the fight for Tilden's nomina- 
tion in 1876 and appeared before the Elec- 
toral Commission, as that nominee's counsel, 
in an effort to defeat a conspiracy boldly bent 
upon seating Rutherford B. Hayes. 

Unlike most Marylanders whose names have 
been written indelibly into American history, 



Maryland in National Politics. 223 

Montgomery Blair entered the public service 
with the advantage of distinguished lineage. 
He was the son of Francis Preston Blair, 
editor of the Globe, a famous newspaper pub- 
lished in Washington during the administra- 
tion of Andrew Jackson. This publication 
was the organ of the Jackson regime and its 
editor was the intimate friend and adviser of 
the Chief Executive and unqualifiedly the 
most powerful private citizen in the land. 
James Blair, the grandfather, was for 23 years 
Attorney-General of Kentucky, and one of the 
foremost lawyers west of the Allegany Moun- 
tains. 

Blair's mother was a daughter of Nathaniel 
Gist, scion of an illustrious Maryland family 
and himself a Brigadier-General in the Revo- 
lutionary Army. General Gist's grandfather, 
Richard Gist, was one of the commissioners 
who laid out the City of Baltimore. To this 
ancestral line Montgomery Blair united an- 
other equally renowned when he married 
Mary Elizabeth Woodbury, daughter of Levi 
Woodbury, Governor of New Hampshire, 
Senator, Cabinet Officer and Associate Justice 
of the United States Supreme Court. 

Thus favored by family connections, Blair 
was spared that obscurity which usually claims 
an ambitious youth in a country where titles 



224 Maryland in National Politics. 

of nobility and rank, as a birthright, are un- 
known. But this young man inherited more 
than an honored name. To him descended a 
superb mental equipment, the spirit of a born 
fighter and a will that yielded blindly to the 
judgement of discipline of no man or no set of 
men. Intellectual independence marked his 
course from his first appearance before the 
people until the end of his life. 

Born in Kentucky in 1813, Blair remained 
in that State until President Jackson appointed 
him to a cadetship at West Point. He gradu- 
ated from that institution in 1835 in the same 
class with General Meade, Commander-in- 
Chief of the Army of the Potomac at Gettys- 
burg. The young Lieutenant served through 
the Seminole War in Florida, but resigned 
from the army in 1836 to take up the study of 
law at Transylvania University, in Kentucky. 
A year later he moved to St. Louis and entered 
upon the practice of his profession, becoming 
the friend and protege of Senator Benton. 
Shortly after his arrival in that city he organ- 
ized the Montgomery Guard, composed whol- 
ly of Irish citizens, and the first military or- 
ganization of that nationality to be formed in 
the United States. 

Blair's career as a public official began with 
his appointment in 1839 as United States Dis- 



Maryland in National Politics. 225 

trict Attorney for the district of Missouri. He 
was removed from this office by President Ty- 
ler, but was in 1845 elected Judge of the Court 
of Common Pleas. He retired from the bench 
four years afterward to form a law partnership 
with his brother, F. P. Blair. Having accumu- 
lated a comfortable fortune in St. Louis, Blair 
removed to Maryland in 1853, and at once ac- 
quired a lucrative practice in the Maryland 
and District Courts. President Pierce in 1855 
named him Solicitor of the Court of Claims. 
This was the second office under the federal 
government which Blair occupied, and from 
this President Buchanan removed him in 1858 
because of the Marylander's pronounced views 
on the slavery question. 

Meanwhile, Blair had become active in poli- 
tics. He had followed his father into the 
Democratic party and, like his distinguished 
progenitor, he was an ardent supporter of 
Jacksonian principles. He remained in the 
Democratic ranks until the issue of slavery 
split them and drove thousands of old-line fol- 
lowers to the shelter of less conservative or- 
ganizations. Blair's first venture after the 
false gods of politics was his temporary enlist- 
ment in the American party, an organization 
controlled in the State at that time by Henry 
Winter Davis. 

16 



226 Maryland in National Politics. 

Finding the future Americanism wholly un- 
promising and its propaganda silent upon the 
one issue which cried aloud its challenge to 
the country, Blair withdrew his support of 
that organization, turning his attention to the 
re-creation of the Republican party upon a 
national scale. In quitting the Americans, 
however, he made an uncompromising enemy 
of Henry Winter Davis. And Davis' resent- 
ment pursued Blair until the death of the 
former. 

Until 1855 the Republican party had little 
standing. It was controlled where any or- 
ganization at all existed by rabid opponents to 
slavery or by malcontents who rushed to it be- 
cause there was no other place to rush. The 
Whig party had disbanded following the 
Presidential election of 1852. The Northern 
and Southern wings of that organization had 
been unable to harmonize upon the slavery 
question or to find other common ground upon 
which they might stand. The dissolution of 
the Whigs gave immediate impetus to the 
American party, but even this did not furnish 
an abiding place for the red-blooded opposi- 
tion to Democracy as dominated by Southern 
statesmanship. 

In 1845 the reorganized Republicans deter- 
mined upon a serious campaign for a place of 



Maryland in National Politics. 227 

power in the nation. They started out deliber- 
ately to capture the House of Representatives 
in the bi-election and, to the utter amazement 
of the Democratic leaders, they made a win- 
ning fight. As soon as Congress organized 
they nominated Nathaniel P. Banks for the 
Speakership and after a contest yet famous in 
parliamentary annals, they elected him. Such 
a triumph in displacing the Know-Nothings as 
the second party aroused unbounded enthusi- 
asm in the new organization and simultane- 
ously an overpowering ambition to land the 
Presidency itself. 

Montgomery Blair and his father, Francis 
Preston Blair, cast their lot with the Republi- 
cans in time to participate in the Congression- 
al campaign of 1854. They joined heartily in 
the assembling of the remote elements of that 
conglomerate organization into a big, compact 
fighting body. Before this there had been no 
concentration, no centralization of forces nor 
fixed program of issues. Nor had there ap- 
peared any national leadership upon which the 
Republicans could safely rely for guidance, 
though they had gained control of many of the 
free States by 1855. 

Early in 1 856 the demand for a national con- 
vention which should nominate a Republican 
candidate for the Presidency, crystallized in 



228 Maryland in National Politics. 

the issuance of a call from Washington for 
such a body to meet in Philadelphia on June 
17. This call was headed by Francis P. Blair, 
representing the State of Maryland. Twenty 
other signatures were attached, representing 
as many States. Authority for the circular 
was given at a preliminary convention held in 
Pittsburgh on February 21 of that year. The 
elder Blair had presided over that early as- 
semblage and was at that period the recognized 
leader of the Republican forces throughout the 
country. 

In response to this call, delegates from all 
the free States came together in Philadelphia 
in June. Montgomery Blair and his father 
headed the Maryland contingent. In the ranks 
of that body were all shades of anti-slavery 
opinion. The Abolitionists, the Free Soilers, 
Know-Nothings, Democrats who had sup- 
ported the Wilmot Proviso, and Whigs who 
had followed Seward were on hand. No con- 
test over candidates took place. Neither 
Chase, nor Seward, nor Judge McLean wanted 
the nomination, feeling, as they did, that the 
time had' come when the Republicans could 
elect a President. 

The Blairs, however, had a candidate. Early 
in the movement for a national convention 
they had proposed that General John C. Fre- 



Maryland in National Politics. 229 

mont who had rendered brilliant service in 
the army as an explorer of the West and as a 
Senator from California, be named. General 
Fremont had married the accomplished 
daughter of Senator Benton, of Missouri, a 
warm friend of the elder Blair. By skilful 
maneuvering the Blairs threw the nomination 
to the General. William J. Dayton, a Sena- 
tor from New Jersey, was nominated for the 
Vice-Presidency. 

This was Montgomery Blair's first essay in- 
to the field of national politics. Fremont was 
defeated by Buchanan, but the size of his 
popular vote astonished the opposition, con- 
vincing the Democratic leaders that a new and 
formidable foe had come forward. And the 
strength of this organization was vastly in- 
creased by the Dred Scott decision of the Su- 
preme Court, handed down about this time. 
The younger Blair appeared as the leading 
counsel for the plaintiff in that case, being op- 
posed by the veteran, Reverdy Johnson. Blair 
lost his case before this Court, but his prestige 
with the anti-slavery people assumed new pro- 
portions by reason of this association with their 
cause. 

The Marylander further endeared himself 
to the anti-slavery element when, in 1859, he 
insisted that John Brown, leader of a band of 



230 Maryland in National Politics. 

misguided fanatics, in a raid upon the govern- 
ment arsenal at Harper's Ferry, have the bene- 
fit of a fair trial. Blair had himself been asked 
to defend Brown, but there were circumstances 
that made it impossible for him to appear in 
court. He and Governor Andrew, of Massa- 
chusetts, however, retained Samuel Clinton to 
defend Brown and to demand for the prisoner 
such safeguards as the law allows even the 
commonest criminal. There was no purpose 
on the part of Blair to palliate the crime of 
which Brown stood accused, but he and many 
others were convinced that the raider was men- 
tally unbalanced and, if so, they demanded that 
he have the benefit of special counsel. 

In the convention of i860 the Blairs again 
headed the Maryland delegation. Eleven 
delegates were originally named to represent 
the State, but sixteen appeared at the conven- 
tion hall and asked to be seated. Montgomery 
Blair made a speech urging the admission of 
the entire number, but his effort was unavail- 
ing. The father and son took up the candidacy 
of Lincoln, whose strongest rival was Seward. 
On the final ballot these two spokesmen of 
Maryland Republicanism carried nine out of 
the eleven members of the delegation for the 
Illinoisan. 



Maryland in National Politics. 231 

Lincoln's nomination was followed by his 
election, and that by the difficult task of form- 
ing a Cabinet. The President went about this 
in his own way and, mindful of the services 
which Montgomery Blair had performed for 
the party and for the Union, the Executive 
invited the Marylander to become Postmaster- 
General in the new administration. This gave 
offence to many of Lincoln's closest friends, 
particularly to a group of Marylanders head- 
ed by Henry Winter Davis. They insisted 
that Blair was in no way identified with the 
State, that he was, in effect, a non-resident, and 
that his association with the Union forces was 
too recent to be genuine. 

Lincoln overruled these objections, but he 
could not silence the objectors. At the very 
outset they made an issue of the Blair appoint- 
ment, and because of it fomented discord in 
Congress and wherever else they could exert 
pressure. And in their campaign against the 
new official they were given unconscious aid 
and encouragement by Blair himself. He 
was temperamentally combative and, in main- 
taining his position upon the vital problems 
with which the war administration wrestled 
from the very day of its inauguration, he 
showed no consideration for any interest, large 



232 Maryland in National Politics. 

or small, not determined upon immediately 
crushing the rebellion. 

This spirit of obstinacy manifested itself in 
the very first division among the members of 
the new Cabinet, a division, incidentally, that 
was never wiped out and one which threatened 
for a time to bring to a sudden end Blair's 
official tenure. This controversy arose over 
the relief of Fort Sumter, then beleaguered 
by South Carolina militiamen. Secretary of 
State Seward, backed by the military judgment 
of General Scott, stubbornly resisted any move 
to reinforce that garrison, first, because it was 
deemed to be impossible, and second, because 
Seward still hoped to effect a conciliation of 
the South. Blair's indignation at a policy that 
would deliberately sacrifice the little band of 
federal soldiers then holding the fort, without 
even an attempt at rescue, knew no bounds. 
And finding the President inclined to agree 
with Seward, the Marylander wrote his resig- 
nation, refusing to be even officially a party to 
any such surrender. This chapter in Blair's 
career is recorded in the recently published 
diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary 
of the Navy. Welles says : 

"Postmaster-General Blair, who had been a close 
and near observer of what had taken place through 
the winter and spring, took an opposite view from 
Mr. Seward and General Scott. To some extent he 



Maryland in National Politics. 233 

was aware of the understanding which Mr. Seward 
had with the members of Buchanan's administra- 
tion, or was suspicious of it, and his indignation that 
any idea of abandoning Sumter should be enter- 
tained or thought of was unbounded. With the ex- 
ception of Mr. Seward, all his colleagues concurred 
with Mr. Blair at the commencement, but as the sub- 
ject was discussed and the impossibility and inutility 
of the scheme was urged, with assurance from the 
first military men in the country, whose advice was 
sought and given, that it was a military necessity to 
leave Sumter to its fate, the opinions of men 
changed, or they began at least to waver. Mr. 
Blair saw these misgivings, in which he did not at 
all participate, and finally, observing that the Presi- 
dent, with the acquiescence of the Cabinet, was about 
adopting the Seward and Scott policy, he wrote his 
resignation, determined not to remain in the Cabinet 
if no attempt were made to relieve Fort Sumter. 
Before handing in his resignation, a delay was made 
at the request of his father. The elder Blair sought 
an interview with the President, to whom he entered 
his protest against non-action, which he denounced 
as the offspring of intrigue. His earnestness and 
indignation aroused and electrified the President; 
and when, in his zeal, Blair warned the President 
that the abandonment of Sumter would be justly 
considered by the people, by the world, by history, 
as treason to the counry, he touched a chord that re- 
sponded to his invocation." 

The President thereupon completely re- 
versed his policy, ordered Sumter reinforced 
and the whole of the Home Squadron to pro- 
ceed at once to the relief of the beseiged fort- 
ress. The Postmaster-General triumphed, but 



234 Maryland in National Politics. 

in doing so he incurred other enmities and 
made for himself a position more uncomfort- 
able in the official household of the President. 
Unmoved by the storms he had created, Blair 
receded not one inch from the aggressive atti- 
tude he had assumed from the beginning of 
his service in the Cabinet. On the contrary, 
he invited further trouble, when, in less than a 
year from the clash over Sumter, he boldly 
denounced the unwarranted seizure of Mason 
and Slidell, the two Confederate envoys taken 
from the British steamer Trent by Captain 
Wilkes, of the American man-of-war San 
Jacinto. 

This act of the American naval officer 
aroused tremendous enthusiasm throughout 
the entire North. It was hailed as a deed of 
heroism, and the captain, after being thanked 
by Congress, commended highly by the ad- 
ministration, was feted and toasted wherever 
he made his appearance. The seizure, how- 
ever, produced a profound sensation in Great 
Britain. War with the United States was 
threatened. An ultimatum to this govern- 
ment was issued by the British ministry and a 
warning given that the failure to release the 
two prisonerswould be followed by tragic con- 
sequences. Long before England pronounced 
her threats and while the country was still 



Maryland in National Politics. 235 

effervescing over Captain Wilkes' deed, one 
man there was who foresaw the troubles ahead 
and who stood alone in the Lincoln Cabinet 
against a defence of the indefensible folly of 
Wilkes. That man was Montgomery Blair. 
And though he brought upon himself the re- 
proach of his colleagues and the unmeasured 
abuse of the country, he had his vindication, 
when, a few weeks after the British protest was 
received, the administration threw up its 
hands and delivered the Confederate prisoners 
to the officer of an English frigate off Cape 
Cod. Charles Francis, writing of the Trent 
affair fifty years afterwards, has this to say of 
Blair's resistance of the popular clamor for 
detention, at whatever cost, of the two envoys: 

"As a final result of recent investigations I have 
reached the conclusion that, among those occupying 
positions of prominence and political responsibility 
in American public life at thattime,two only preserved 
their poise throughout the Mason and Slidell episode, 
and, taking in all the aspects of the situation, both 
acted with discretion and counseled wisely. These 
two men were Montgomery Blair and, somewhat 
strange to say, Charles Sumner. They alone, using 
the vernacular, did not 'slop over,' prematurely and 
inconsiderately committing either themselves or the 
country, whether in private speech or public utter- 
ance. Though not quoted at the time, Mr. Blair's 
attitude was more pronounced. According to Secre- 
tary Welles, he 'from the first denounced Wilkes' act 
as unauthorized, irregular and illegal,' and even went 



236 Maryland in National Politics. 

so far as to advise that Wilkes be ordered to take 
the San Jacinto and go with Mason and Slidell to 
England, and deliver them to the British govern- 
ment. 

"Taken immediately and openly in the presence 
of the whole world, the position advised by Mr. 
Blair would have indicated the supreme confidence 
we felt in our national power and the pronounced 
contempt in which we held both those whom we 
called 'rebels' and those whom they termed 'envoys.' 
Such a line of conduct, immediately decided on and 
boldly declared, would have been an inspiration 
worthy of a Cavour or a Bismarck; but, though ac- 
tually urged in the Cabinet by Mr. Blair, its adoption 
called for a grasp of the situation and a quickness of 
decision which, very possibly, could not reasonably 
be expected under conditions then existing." 

These marks of Blair's sturdy independence 
were, however, soon to have a wider significa- 
tion than mere differences of opinion among 
counselors of a common cause. The same op- 
position to the Marylander's appointment to 
the Cabinet followed him relentlessly and 
gathered volume as Seward and Stanton and 
other powerful factors united with Blair's de- 
tractors. Many honest friends of Lincoln, too, 
sincerely believed that the Executive harbored 
in the ex-Democratic Postmaster-General a 
disloyal adviser. The President never shared 
in this distrust, though, when political expedi- 
ency demanded it, he did not hesitate to lend 
himself to a bargain, the price of which was 



Maryland in National Politics. 237 

the Postmaster-General's resignation. And the 
story of this denouement brings us to a climax 
in the life of Montgomery Blair. 

General John C. Fremont, late friend and 
political protege of the Blairs, during the 
course of the war had been assigned to com- 
mand the Departmentof Missouri. Following 
his successful campaigning in that State, he is- 
sued, upon his own responsibility and without 
consultation with any authority, a proclamation 
setting free the slaves within his jurisdiction. 
This high-handed action was met with a 
storm of protest, particularly from General 
Frank P. Blair, brother of the Postmaster- 
General. When the President was informedof 
the proclamation he showed deep irritation 
and, revoking the emanicpation order of his 
General, recalled the field officer, assigning 
him to a small command in West Virginia, to 
remain there until the end of the war. 

Openly resenting this banishment and the 
rebuke, all of _ which General Fremont as- 
cribed to the activities and influence of the 
Blairs, that officer announced himself a candi- 
date for the Presidency against Lincoln and 
McClellan. Such a candidacy was dangerous 
only in so far as it might split the Union forces 
and elect a Democrat to succeed Lincoln. 
With this possibility in mind, friends of Lin- 



238 Maryland in National Politics. 

coin opened negotiations with General Fre- 
mont, looking to his retirement from the cam- 
paign. Finally an agreement was reached 
under the terms of which Fremont was to 
withdraw from the race, provided the Presi- 
dent called for the resignation of Montgomery 
Blair. These terms were accepted, and on 
September 23, 1864, the President addressed 
the following letter to the Postmaster-Gen- 
eral: 

"My dear sir : You have generously said to me 
more than once that whenever your resignation 
could be a relief to me, it was at my disposal. The 
time has come. You very well know that this pro- 
ceeds from no dissatisfaction of mine with you per- 
sonally or officially. Your uniform kindness has 
been unsurpassed by that of any friend ; and, while 
it is true that the war does not so greatly add to the 
difficulties of your department as to those of some 
others, it is yet much to say, as I most truly can, that 
in the three years and a half during which you have 
administered the General Postoffice, I remember no 
single complaint against you in connection there- 
with." 

On the same day Blair dispatched the fol- 
lowing response to the President: 

"My dear sir : I have received your note of this 
date referring to my offers to resign whenever you 
should deem it advisable for the public interest that 
I should do so, and stating that in your judgment 
that time has now come. I now, therefore, formally 
tender my resignation of the office of Postmaster- 
General. 



Maryland in National Politics. 239 

"I cannot take leave of you without renewing the 
expressions of my gratitude for the uniform kind- 
ness which has marked your course towards me." 

The circumstances of this, the most extra- 
ordinary proceeding of its kind to which the 
President of the United States was ever a 
party, is faithfully recorded by the historian 
Rhodes. He says: 

"The tide having turned, the President helped the 
movement with the art of the politician. The sixth 
resolution of the Union National Convention virtu- 
ally called for the resignation of Montgomery Blair 
from the Cabinet. During the gloomy summer, 
when everything seemed going wrong, when a 
smaller man would have complied with this demand, 
Lincoln did nothing, knowing that such an effort 
would be compared to the drowning man clutching 
at straws. But when the current began to run in 
his favor, he was willing to make assurance doubly 
sure by lending himself to a bargain which should 
win the support of the still disaffected radicals who 
had placed Fremont in nomination, and of Wade 
and Davis, the authors of the manifesto and the 
most bitter of his opponents, who had influence and 
a considerable following. Fremont was to with- 
draw from the field, and the President was to re- 
quest the resignation of Blair. The bargain was 
faithfully carried out. Fremont's letter of with- 
drawal to do his 'part toward preventing the election 
of the Democratic candidate,' was published in the 
evening journals of September 22, and the next day 
the President requested the resignation of Blair. To 
seal such a bargain was not a dignified proceeding 
on the part of the President of the United States, 
but it was a politic move. When we take into ac- 



240 Maryland in National Politics. 

count the history of the candidates of third parties, 
the earnest following of Fremont, and the estimated 
closeness of the vote in certain important States, the 
political shrewdness of Lincoln was apparent. To 
consolidate the Republican party against its old- 
time opponent, to secure the energetic service of 
Wade, and the silence of Henry Winter Davis by a 
concession that had in it nothing of dishonor, and 
involved no injury to the public service, was a course 
to be adopted, without hesitation, by a master politi- 
cian. Blair, with generosity and patriotism, made 
the sacrifice, and began at once to speak publicly and 
labor earnestly for the re-election of Lincoln." 

Blair was engaged actively throughout the 
campaign that gave Lincoln a second term, 
but when Andrew Johnson succeeded to the 
Presidency, following the assassination of Lin- 
coln, the Marylander faced about and rejoined 
the Democratic party. The reconstruction 
policies of the new regime were primarily re- 
sponsible for this change of affiliation in the 
former Cabinet officer. In 1867 he partici- 
pated in the Maryland Constitutional Conven- 
tion and was elected president of the Anti-Reg- 
istry Convention, held in the State to formulate 
a demand that the right of sufifrage be not re- 
stricted by radical processes designed to dis- 
franchise half the white population. 

Five years later Blair was a delegate from 
Maryland to the Democratic National Con- 
vention that nominated Horace Greeley to op- 
pose General Grant. Four years afterward 



Maryland in National Politics. 241 

he became the stanch supporter of Samuel J. 
Tilden. He was editor of The Union, a news- 
paper founded in Washington for the purpose 
of defending Tilden's interests. The money to 
finance this organ was supplied by W. W. Cor- 
coran. In the following year Blair was en- 
gaged as counsel for Tilden before the Elec- 
toral Commission, the body that finally de- 
clared Hayes entitled to the Presidency. 

In 1878 Blair was elected to the Maryland 
House of Delegates from Montgomery County, 
and was at once made chairman of the Judi- 
ciary Committee of that body. He proposed 
the resolution adopted by the legislature de- 
nouncing the seating of President Hayes. 
When the Democratic National Convention 
assembled in 1880 and Tilden's name was 
again brought forward, it was Blair who car- 
ried a personal letter to that convention from 
the late candidate announcing that under no 
circumstances would he accept another nomi- 
nation. Blair's last move in politics was made 
in 1 882, a year before his death, when he was an 
unsuccessful candidate for Congress from the 
Sixth Maryland District. 

This review has dealt largely with Mont- 
gomery Blair's career as an executive and a 
political factor. It would not be complete, 
however, without reference to his standing as 

16 



242 Maryland in National Politics. 

a profound lawyer. He figured in many of 
the celebrated cases of his time, beginning 
with his appearance against Dred Scott. He 
joined Reverdy Johnson in an attack upon the 
test oath before the Supreme Court in the 
Cummings case, sharing in the notable victory 
achieved. About the same time he defended 
his brother, General Frank P. Blair, of Mis- 
souri, when the same issue was raised. His 
most famous pleading, however, was his de- 
fence of Belknap, when that Cabinet officer 
was impeached before the Senate and ac- 
quitted of the charges preferred by the House 
of Representatives. 

Blair's administration of the Postoffice De- 
partment during the trying period of the war, 
was in itself a monument to him. He estab- 
lished field postmasters recruited from the 
army; he cut off the old franking privilege of 
postmasters; he reduced the cost of mailable 
matter generally, and established many re- 
forms that have stood as guides to his succes- 
sors to this day. 



Maryland in National Politics. 243 

ARTHUR P. GORMAN. 

1839 — 1906 

The field of American statesmanship may be 
surveyed from the commencement of the Re- 
public to this day, its genius may be reckoned, 
its ability may be appraised, and its patriotism 
may be weighed, yet the process, however 
sweeping, will reveal the public service of no 
Marylander whose influence upon the politics 
of his time was more potential than was that of 
Arthur P. Gorman. 

John Hanson was instrumental in evolving 
a system of federated government in America; 
Luther Martin saved the individual States 
from the doctrine of wholesale centralization; 
William Wirt forced the disintegration of an 
ancient political party; Roger B. Taney pre- 
cipitated a civil war by a judicial decision, and 
Reverdy Johnson heroically disarmed the 
enemies of civil liberty as guaranteed by the 
Constitution. 

These were, indeed, splendid contributions 
from the State of Maryland to the annals of 
the nation. Yet it is to be doubted if they will 
endure longer upon the pages of our history 
than will the achievements, in this generation, 
of Arthur P. Gorman, that master of political 



244 Maryland in National Politics. 

strategy, that maker of Presidents, that prince 
of parliamentarians, that commanding general 
of party councils, that skilful director for two 
decades of Congressional action. 

For twenty years the acknowledged leader 
of Democratic fortunes in the Senate of the 
United States, Arthur P. Gorman wielded a 
power in legislation that has been granted to 
but few men in any period of the country's 
career. And by a strange freak of circum- 
stances he was no less a factor, as head of a 
minority element, than when he stood out as 
the guiding spirit of majority forces. The 
truth is, that the greatest triumph of his life — 
the defeat of the Force Bill — was accomplish- 
ed when he and his associates were over- 
whelmingly outnumbered. 

Four epoch-making events signalized the 
part Senator Gorman played in the great 
drama of national affairs, events which made 
his name a household word throughout the 
length and breadth of the land and wrote that 
of Maryland in capital letters wherever poli- 
tics and policies, partisanship and parties were 
an absorbing interest. 

In 1883, a Senator still in the freshman class, 
a man unheard of and unheralded beyond the 
confines of his State, assumed the management 
of the National Democratic organization. 



Maryland in National Politics. 245 

In that campaign he elected a local New York 
politician to the Presidency of the United 
States, the first Democrat to attain that high 
office in 30 years. 

Turning from political leadership to practi- 
cal legislation, this same man helped resurrect 
that clause of the Federal Constitution giving 
Congress authority over trade between the 
States, and under it, write upon the statute 
books a law creating the Interstate Commerce 
Commission. 

Close upon this came the most memorable 
parliamentary battle ever witnessed in Con- 
gress, a battle in which this Marylander led a 
minority party in a victorious assault upon the 
Force Bill, defeating a demand of the united 
Republicans that the South again yield itself 
to negro domination. 

And before his legislative record closed, this 
Senator passed through Congress the Wilson- 
Gorman Tariff Bill, a measure that split the 
party which he had done more than any single 
man to rehabilitate, and brought upon him 
President Cleveland's "party treason, party 
perfidy" anathema. 



It is not the purpose of this sketch to deal 
with the meteoric rise of Senator Gorman 
from a position of utter obscurity in the State 



246 Maryland in National Politics. 

to one of power more absolute than yielded to 
any other man since the commonwealth was 
formed. That is a story of the most intense 
interest and, though it has been told again and 
again, it is one with which every historian of 
Maryland must deeply concern himself. 

This review will comprehend only the broad 
national phases of this Marylander's life, his 
long and honored career as a Senator, his as- 
tute party management, his share in the con- 
structive legislation of five administrations, 
his consummate skill as a diciplinarian, his 
adroit maneuvering against almost insuper- 
able odds and his relationship to the vital 
facts of the period with which his name is his- 
torically associated. 

Arthur P. Gorman entered public life with- 
out the advantage of a fortune or the favor of 
an ancestral line. Nor was he equipped with 
a finished education. At the age of 13 years 
he was a page in the United States Senate, hav- 
ing become the protege and at one time the 
secretary of the "Little Giant from the West," 
Stephen A. Douglas. At the close of the war 
he was assistant postmaster of that body, and a 
little later was made postmaster. He was re- 
moved from that office in 1866, and was almost 
immediately appointed Collector of Internal 
Revenue for Maryland by President Johnson. 



Maryland in National Politics. 247 

When Grant's administration began young 
Gorman retired from the coilectorship. 

In 1869 Gorman was appointed a director in 
the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company. In 
the same year he was elected a member of the 
House of Delegates, serving for one session as 
Speaker of that body. In 1872 he became 
president of the canal company and, as execu- 
tive head of this quasi-State institution, he laid 
the foundation of his resistless political organi- 
zation of later years. Three years afterward 
he was elected to the Senate for a term of four 
years. 

Though Gorman had by this time become a 
factor in State politics and had a strong follow- 
ing throughout the western counties, it is to be 
doubted if he would have been heard of again 
at home but for one of those extraordinary cir- 
cumstances which providentially, it seems, 
changes the whole course of a man's life. 
Senator William Pinkney Whyte was then the 
leading Democratic figure in the State. He 
and Gorman had been political friends and 
when, in 1778, the Democrats gained control 
of the United States Senate, the younger man, 
willing to abandon his interests and prestige in 
the State, sought the comparatively unimport- 
ant position as assistant secretary of that body. 
Senator Whyte refused to indorse Gorman for 



248 Maryland in National Politics. 

the place. The facts about this incident and 
the far-reaching consequences of it are inter- 
estingly recorded in Kent's "Story of Mary- 
land Politics." This author says : 

"It was just after the State election of 1778 that 
the break came between Mr. Gorman and Mr. 
Whyte. It was over a comparatively trivial matter, 
but it created a breach that lasted a lifetime and 
widened as the years went by, embittering both men. 
It was about this time that the Democrats secured 
control of the United States Senate. Gorman, who 
was then in the State Senate, but who loved the life 
at Washington with which he had been familiar for 
so many years, but who had at that time no thought 
of becoming a Senatorial candidate himself, desired 
the position of Assistant Secretary of the Senate. 
With the friends he had at Washington among the 
Democratic Senators, he possessed an advantage over 
the other candidates. With the support of his own 
Senators from Maryland, there would have been no 
question but that he would have gotten the place. 
Senator Groome was, of course, with him. Gorman 
went to Washington and asked Senator Whyte to 
support him for the place. Mr. Whyte told him 
that Senator Dennis, who had just been defeated by 
Senator Groome, through Mr. Gorman, was a candi- 
date for the position and that he was pledged to him. 
Mr. Gorman, it is stated, said to Mr. Whyte, 'I can 
get this place if you will support me. Dennis can 
not get it with or without your support. I want 
the place and I want your support.' 

"Mr. Whyte declined to recede and took the 
ground that he could do nothing but support Senator 
Dennis so long as he chose to be a candidate, al- 
though he. White, had not advised his candidacy. 
Gorman put it up to him squarely, and then, finding 



Maryland in National Politics. 249 

him still unmoved, turned on his heels and left the 
committee room where the interview took place. 
He w'ent direct to Baltimore and stated that night 
that he was a candidate for the United States Senate 
to succeed Mr. Whyte. 

In less than two years from that fateful in- 
terview Arthur P. Gorman had defeated the 
veteran Whyte for the Senate, had formed an 
alliance with political forces in the State that 
gave him undisputed control of its party or- 
ganization and placed him in a position to 
dictate, unconditionally, Democratic policies 
and Democratic candidacies for a quarter of a 
century. No American Commonwealth has 
ever been, for so long a time, ruled by the ar- 
bitrary will of one man, as was Maryland dur- 
ing the regime of Arthur P. Gorman. 

Such were the singular circumstances that 
inaugurated a career in national affairs des- 
tined to record the name of this Marylander 
among the illustrious legislators of a century. 
On March 3, 1881, Gorman took his seat in the 
Senate of the United States, the same body 
whose assistant secretary he had, three years 
before, sought to be. He joined the ranks of 
the unfamed, a private in prestige, a novice in 
experience. 

But ambition's fires burned in that breast. 
He dreamed of the day when he would assume 
a position of command in that, the greatest de- 



250 Maryland in National Politics. 

liberative council of the world. As a youth he 
had been familair with the intellectual giants 
of the Civil War and Reconstruction period. 
The venerable Clay still lingered in the Sen- 
ate when this boy first appeared at the Nation- 
al Capital. Sumner and Seward were just ris- 
ing in their transcendent glory. Judah P. 
Benjamin, William L. Yancey, Robert 
Toom>bs and Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson 
Davis, Lewis, Cass, Trumbull, Fessenden, 
Grimes and Hamlin were his preceptors. In 
maturer years he had known L. Q. C. Lamar, 
Ben Hill, Roscoe Conkling, James G. Blaine 
and James A. Garfield, Senators of a distin- 
guished line. And the recollection of these 
statesmen had a determining effect upon the 
aspirations of this young Marylander. 

Nor did he wait long for his opportunity. 
In 1884 he was made Chairman of the Demo- 
craticNational Committee by the same conven- 
tion that nominated Grover Cleveland, Gov- 
ernor of New York, for the Presidency. James 
G. Blaine, the brilliant, the gifted, the veteran 
exponent of Republicanism, wasnamed to head 
the opposing ticket, and at the beginning of 
the campaign it seemed that the Cleveland 
fight was hopeless. The Democratic nominee 
had not lived down the violent assault upon 
his personal character, made when he was 



Maryland in National Politics. 251 

nominated for Governor. The party itself had 
not recovered its credit with the country. 
The Republicans were intrenched in every 
State in the North and East. Six successive 
victories had fortified them with an impreg- 
nable organization. 

These handicaps did not daunt Arthur P. 
Gorman. He realized the strength of the op- 
position, but he also recognized their weak- 
nesses. He knew that they were too confident 
of success and he proceeded to attack their un- 
guarded strongholds. He constructed a politi- 
cal map of the United States. He studied 
every State, city and district where there was 
a chance to win. He brought into his con- 
ference every leader of consequence in the 
country. He dismissed from consideration 
every section that was impossible and concen- 
trated all his strength where there was hope of 
success. And in his processes he demonstrated 
a genius for organization that surprised his 
friends and amazed his opponents. And then 
came that spectacular climax, just three days 
before the election. Senator Blaine was clos- 
ing his campaign in New York City. He was 
called upon by a body of Protestant ministers, 
headed by the unbridled Burchard. The dec- 
laration was publicly made that the strength 
of the Democratic party was "rum, Romanism 



252 Maryland in National Politics. 

and rebellion." Gorman instantly saw the 
possibility of this intemperate statement. With 
a shrewdness worthy of any political strategist, 
the Democratic manager seized upon this 
wretched blunder. In twelve hours he had 
spread it broadcast over the country. It turned 
the tide and swept Grover Cleveland into the 
White House and the innocent Blaine into re- 
tirement forever. 

Senator Gorman has never been denied the 
credit for the masterful manner in which this 
campaign was conducted. Every party leader 
recognized the marvelous skill which the Na- 
tional Chairman brought to bear upon the re- 
sult. Bayard, Manning, Lamar and Garland, 
that group which had picked the Marylander 
for the difficult post, applauded his work. 
Cleveland himself admitted that the victory 
belonged to Gorman, and that the Republicans 
had simply been outgeneraled. Wherever 
Gorman showed himself after this contest he 
received an ovation. His name, unknown and 
unsung before this campaign, was cheered 
whenever it was pronounced. 

The Marylander immediately assumed a 
position of importance in the Senate. He was 
looked upon as the spokesman of the new ad- 
ministration, the intimate friend and adviser 
of the President. He aided the Executive in 



Maryland in National Politics. 253 

forming a Cabinet and in formulating the 
party policies. As National Chairman, his 
voice was all-powerful in matters of minor 
patronage and rewards. This close relation- 
ship with the administration continued dur- 
ing Cleveland's four-year term and was re- 
newed at the beginning of the second term. It 
was not disturbed until the Wilson-Gorman 
Tariff Bill was presented to the country. 

Senator Gorman's first association with con- 
structive legislation of historic interest was in 
1885, when he served upon the special com- 
mittee that proposed the Interstate Commerce 
Act of 1887. This Act created the Interstate 
Commerce Commission, now recognized as 
the most important board ever established by 
the Congress of the United States. Not only 
did the Marylander aid in drafting this far- 
reaching measure, but when the issue came on 
the floor of the Senate, he recruited the votes 
from the minority that prevented its defeat. It 
is an astonishing fact that the commerce clause 
of the Federal Constitution lay dormant for 
nearly a century. With the exception of two 
minor acts, no statute had been passed under it, 
or its tremenduous power invoked. This is 
even more surprising, too, when it is recalled 
that the Supreme Court, in a long line of 
decisions, beginning with Gibbons vs. Odgen 



254 Maryland in National Politics. 

and including Baltimore & Ohio vs. Mary- 
land, had held that the States, as such, had no 
control whatever over interstate commerce. 

By 1880, however, the necessity for railroad 
regulation became apparent to all far-seeing 
men. In the earlier days the question was not 
how to control these carriers, but how to se- 
cure them. The roads grew to such propor- 
tions in the seventies, however, that they 
threatened to become the masters and not the 
servants of the people. Their abuses, their re- 
bates, their flagrant discriminations, their 
overcapitalization aroused public indignation 
to such an extent that the Granger Movement 
resulted. In 1885 Shelby M. Cullom, of Il- 
linois, introduced in the Senate the first bill 
ever drafted giving the government regulatory 
control of the railroads. Before this could 
come to an issue a Select Committee, composed 
of Senators Cullom, Piatt, of Connecticut, 
Miller, of New York, Gorman, of Maryland, 
and Harris, of Tennessee, was named to tour! 
the country and report upon the most practi- 
cable measure that could be devised. 

At the first session of the Forty-ninth Con- 
gress the committee bill was presented, and im- 
mediately there followed the most determined 
legislative struggle Senator Gorman had ever 
participated in. Such Senators as Cameron, 



Maryland in National Politics. 255 

Frye, Hawley, Hoar, Morrill, Sawyer, Sewell, 
Sherman and Spooner opposed the bill. They 
first took ground against the whole of it, but 
later concentrated their fire upon the long and 
short haul clause, and that clause against 
pooling. Gorman organized the minority 
in favor of the bill, and Cullom and 
Allison mustered enough Republicans to 
drive it through. The Interstate Commerce 
Commission was brought into being and has 
long since vindicated its existence. The Hep- 
burn, the Elkins and the LaFollette Acts have, 
in later years, strengthened its power by giving 
it sweeping jurisdiction over all transportation 
business of the country. 

During all this time the Democratic forces 
in the Senate had been in a minority. The 
House had been Democratic, but at no stage 
of his administration did President Cleveland 
have the support of both branches of Congress. 
James B. Beck, of Kentucky, had been the 
minority leader in the Senate. He died in 
1889, and Senator Gorman was promptly and 
unanimously chosen as chairman of the mi- 
nority caucus, a position which gave him the 
titular as well as the actual leadership of his 
party in the upper branch of Congress. This 
leadership he held until his death, save for the 
brief period when he was in retirement. 



256 Maryland in National Politics. 

Within one year from the time Senator Gor- 
man assumed the responsibilities of his new 
post he was to be engaged in a titanic struggle 
for the protection of the South against the ruin 
and disaster to which the Force Bill would 
have driven it. This measure had been intro- 
duced by Senator Lodge in the first session of 
the Fifty-first Congress, but its authors dared 
not take it up for a vote. It went over until 
the December session, when on the first day it 
was brought forward by a clear majority of 
eleven. 

To understand the bitter opposition of the 
Democrats to this measure it is necessary to 
recall the conditions that confronted the South 
at that time. The Southern States had barely 
shaken off the last of the carpet-bag regime. 
The passions of the Civil War had not sub- 
sided. Partisan feeling ran high, and to every 
Southerner the Force Bill meant a stab to the 
heart. Its effect, they conceived, would be to 
return their section once more to dark days of 
negro domination. They fought against this 
measure, therefore, as men fight for their lives. 

Speaker Reed had driven the Lodge Bill 
through the House without the formality of a 
roll call. President Harrison sent message 
after message to Congress, urging its enact- 
ment. Every Republican Senator was pledged 



Maryland in National Politics. 257 

to its support. Nothing stood between the 
South and chaos, wreck and ruin, except a 
helpless and an all but hopeless minority of 
Democratic Senators. Every Democrat in 
that chamber, in this crisis, turned to Gorman, 
as if by instinct. If any man lived who could 
save the South, they believed he could do it. 
Against him was pitted the venerable Hoar, 
who had assumed management of the majority 
forces. Hoar was flanked on either side by 
Aldrich and Edmonds, the most dangerous 
strategists in the majority ranks. Supporting 
this triumvirate was a compact, aggressive and 
determined body of men, a body holding the 
votes to crystallize the bill into law if the time 
should come when they might cast them. 

It seemed that Gorman led a forlorn hope. 
But he was undaunted, unmoved, unafraid. 
He rallied his soldiers behind him. In his 
cohorts he had a splendid battery of orator- 
ical and debating talent. He deployed these 
skirmishers on the floor of the Senate, and day 
and night they kept up a rapid fire. They as- 
sailed every position which the Republicans 
had assumed, and their arguments were unan- 
swerable. Days and nights passed, then weeks, 
but the battle line was unbroken. And all the 
while the minority leaned upon their strong, 
vigilant leader, or, as Senator Bayard ex- 

17 



258 Maryland in National Politics. 

pressed it, the "quiet, self-sustaining and self- 
sustained man whom Maryland has given to 
the country." 

Every ruse, every maneuver known to par- 
liamentary skill was resorted to by the Repub- 
licans to break down Gorman's defense. Final- 
ly, finding themselves unable to keep up the 
exhausting fight, the majority leaders tried to 
take the Democrats off their feet for the pas- 
sage of a cloture rule. The Vice-President 
failed them, however, refusing to be a party to 
such a revolutionary act. This maddening 
failure seemed to demoralize the Republican 
Senators. At all events, it weakened them with 
the country and increased the pressure from 
the outside for an abandonment of the fight. 
Sentiment, even in the North, had radically 
changed toward the bill during the course of 
this unequal, but intensely dramatic struggle, 
and in changing it had made itself felt in the 
councils of the Republicans. 

The first test had come on December 3, when 
the Hoar motion to take up the bill had passed 
by a vote of 41 to 30. The final test came on 
January 26 following, when Senator Walcott, 
of Colorado, asked Senator Morgan to yield 
the floor that he might make a motion to take 
up the apportionment bill under the Eleventh 
Census. This was the signal of Democratic 



Maryland in National Politics. 259 

victory. The solid Republican phalanx had 
broken. The motion to displace the Force 
Bill was adopted by a vote of 34 to 33, and 
from that hour the measure was dead beyond 
hope of resurrection. Of this, the fiercest and 
greatest of parliamentary battles under this 
government, Senator J. C. S. Blackburn, of 
Kentucky, one of Gorman's lieutenants, has 
said: 

"Never while life lasts can I forget the incidents 
of that struggle. The days went by but slowly and 
the weeks dragged their weary length along, whilst 
without adjournment, night and day, the small band 
was on duty and its unswerving, brave, devoted 
commander was on deck. I venture to assert that 
in all the tide of time you will search in vain among 
the records of the English-speaking people of this 
world to find a parallel to the splendid generalship, 
the resourcefulness, the matchless courage, the un- 
questioning devotion, and the brilliant commander- 
ship that Gorman manifested on this occasion. A 
forlorn hope, of course, he led ; battlements impreg- 
nable he could not scale, but he accomplished his 
purpose. He saved the South and, in my judgment, 
he saved the North as well, when, by a flank move- 
ment, he sidetracked the Force Bill and buried it in 
a grave to which it should have been doomed from 
its birth. The most splendid parliamentary battle of 
which history gives us record was the one fought 
and the one that was won by the Maryland leader." 

This triumph found Senator Gorman at the 
zenith of his career. He was honored 
throughout the nation and beloved throughout 



26o Maryland in National Politics. 

the South. There was nothing in the gift of 
that section that would have been denied him. 
There was nothing within the gift of his party 
as a whole that he could not have had for the 
asking. And because of the profound debt 
which Democracy owed this Marylander, his 
break a few years later with President Cleve- 
land was the more deeply deplored. 

In 1893 Cleveland returned to the White 
House, having been elected upon a platform 
pledged to the repeal of the McKinley Tarifif 
Act. This Act had been introduced as a com- 
panion measure to the Force Bill, and had 
been enacted by a strict party vote. It was 
instrumental in producing Benjamin Harri- 
son's panic, the same panic to which Cleveland 
fell heir. The Harrison administration had 
been swept out upon the tarifif issue, and with it 
the Republican majority in the Senate. In the 
reorganization of that body Gorman became 
the Chairman of the Finance Committee and 
the most powerful figure in either branch of 
Congress. 

At the first session of the Fifty-third Con- 
gress the Wilson Tarifif Bill, designed to su- 
persede the McKinley Act, was passed by the 
House. It was sent to the Senate and referred 
to Senator Gorman's committee. When it 
emerged it had been amended almost one thou- 



Maryland in National Politics. 261 

sand times. And as amended in committee it 
passed the Senate. It was returned to the 
House, and shortly afterward sent to confer- 
ence, where it remained for weeks. Meantime 
the country's disappointment at the Senate's 
action had assumed concrete form. Charges 
were made that Gorman and his associates had 
sold out to the protected interests; that they 
had deliberately bargained with the Sugar 
Trust, for instance, and that campaign contri- 
butions were being repaid in the pending leg- 
islation. These animadversions reached a cli- 
max when President Cleveland addressed a 
letter to William L. Wilson, accusing the Sen- 
ate majority of "party perfidy and party dis- 
honor." 

It was known of all men that the President, 
though he called no names, leveled this asper- 
sion at Senator Gorman. This letter created 
a profound sensation. It divided the party 
following in each house and, ultimately, 
throughout the country. The President, on 
his part, refused to sign the Wilson-Gorman 
bill, permitting it to become a law by default. 
Senator Gorman, whose personal honor and 
party loyalty had been impeached, refused to 
keep silent. On the contrary, he rose upon 
the floor of the Senate on July 23, 1894, ^"^ i" 



262 Maryland in National Politics. 

the course of an indignant denial of the 
charges made by the President, declared: 

"As I have said, sir, that is a most extraordinary 
proceeding for a Democrat elected to the highest 
office in the government, and fellow-Democrats in 
another high place, where they have the right to 
speak and legislate generally, to join with the com- 
mune in traducing the Senate of the United States, 
to blacken the character of Senators who are as 
honorable as they are, who are as patriotic as they 
ever can be, who have done as much to serve their 
party as men who are now beneficiaries of your labor 
and mine, to taunt and jeer at us before the country 
as the advocates of trusts and as guilty of dishonor 
and perfidy." 

Many contemporaries of Senator Gorman 
have borne witness to the fact that no import- 
ant change was made in that tarifif bill by the 
Senate without previous consultation with the 
President himself. Among those who testi- 
fied to this were Senator Voorhees, of Indiana ; 
Harris, of Tennessee; Vest, of Missouri; 
Jones, of Arkansas, and Blackburn, of Ken- 
tucky. They maintained obstinately that the 
President was equally responsible with them 
for circumstances of its amendment and pas- 
sage, regardless of the terrific censure he di- 
rected at them. 

Senator Gorman's popularity throughout 
the country suffered severely as a result of this 
break with the President. In the next election 



Maryland in National Politics. 263 

the Democrats in Maryland lost the State. In 
1899 Gorman himself was succeeded in the 
Senate by Louis E. McComas. Four years 
later, however, he resumed his seat in that 
body, holding it until his death in 1906. He 
was warmly welcomed when he returned and, 
by common consent, he was again awarded the 
leadership of his party. 

Congressional procedure has developed four 
pre-emniently great parliamentary leaders. 
Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, Thaddeus 
Stevens and Arthur P. Gorman compose that 
accomplished galaxy. Each of them, in his 
time, seemed destined to the Presidency, yet 
none of them attained it. Their place in his- 
tory is, however, as securely fixed as is that of 
Webster, Benton, Calhoun, Tilden or Blaine, 
disappointed Presidential aspirants, yet states- 
men whose service to their country will be re- 
membered as long as American traditions are 
honored. 



264 Maryland in National Politics. 

ISIDOR RAYNER 

1850— 19 1 2 

American history pays an eloquent tribute 
to the ability and learning of the Maryland 
bar, a tribute recorded in the fact that a Mary- 
land lawyer appeared as an advocate in practi- 
cally every great trial, involving a national 
interest, during the first century of our life as 
a nation. The bar of no other State enjoys a 
distinction more unique nor a renown more ex- 
traordinary. 

It was Luther Martin who acquitted Asso- 
ciate Justice Chase in the impeachment pro- 
ceeding before the Senate; it was William 
Wirt who prosecuted Aaron Burr on the 
charge of high treason ; it was Roger B. Taney 
who defended General Wilkinson, comman- 
der-in-chief of the United States army; it was 
Reverdy Johnson who tried the Dred Scott 
case, who saved Andrew Johnson and went to 
the rescue of Mrs. Surratt; it was Montgomery 
Blair who opposed Scott, who argued the 
Cummings test-oath cause and who bore the 
burden of Secretary Belknap's defence, and it 
was Isidor Rayner who plead the cause of Ad- 
miral Schley before a naval court of inquiry. 



Maryland in National Politics. 265 

These were famous proceedings in their 
time, but in none of them did counsel and cli- 
ent have a more nearly equal hold upon public 
interest than did Rayner and Schley. And in 
none of them did the lawyer reap a greater 
harvest of honor than did Isidor Rayner. 
Greater issues had been raised before the tri- 
bunals of the country, but none, save the An- 
drew Johnson impeachment, more deeply 
stirred the blood of the nation than did the 
bureaucratic conspiracy to rob an heroic officer 
of his title to a great victory. 

But this trial did more than lay bare the un- 
worthy designs of an unworthy administration. 
It introduced Isidor Rayner to the country; it 
exalted him to a place among the brilliant 
pleaders of his day; it impressed the people of 
his State with the breadth of his intellectual 
equipment, and it ultimately elevated him to 
the United States Senate, the theatre of his 
greatest service to his State, to the nation and 
to the cause of constitutional government. 

Long before the date of the Schley inquiry 
Rayner had become a figure in Maryland poli- 
tics. He had served one term in the House of 
Delegates, four years in the State Senate, six 
years in the Federal House of Representatives, 
and had been elected Attorney-General. His 
practice as a lawyer, coupled with his promi- 



266 Maryland in National Politics. 

nence as an orator in the forum and in the 
courts, had marked him as a coming man. 

In 1905 he was elected to the United States 
Senate, and was re-elected without opposition 
in his party six years later. His fame had 
been established before he reached that body, 
however. His service in the House had given 
him high rank as a debater, and his appeal in 
behalf of Schley endeared him to the people of 
the country, without regard to party affilia- 
tions or partisan prejudices. 

As a member of the Senate, Rayner devoted 
himself to the domestic issues and to the prob- 
lems of international law with which the cen- 
tral government was at that time confronted. 
Here it was that he met and measured strength 
with the master minds of the day, dedicating 
himself unreservedly to a strict construction of 
the Constitution. He planted himself upon 
the charter of the fathers and challenged every 
interest that dared profane that sacred instru- 
ment. 



Isidor Rayner plunged actively into politics 
as soon as he was admitted to the bar. Each 
calling had the same fascination for him. 
Moreover, he firmly believed that the profes- 
sion of the law was inherently linked with the 
practice of politics. He believed that the 



Maryland in National Politics. 267 

members of the bar owed a peculiar debt to 
the State; that the lawyer was as much obli- 
gated to counsel the whole people as he was to 
counsel an individual from whom the retainer 
came, and that the man who undertook to in- 
terpret law and dispense justice under law, 
should take the lead in making law. 

And the whole of Rayner's career as a public 
servant, with the exception of his tenure of the 
Attorney-Generalship, was associated with the 
legislative branch of the government. He 
never filled an executive office, and never as- 
pired to one. He never sat upon the bench, 
and never expected to. From first to last he 
was a lawmaker, a legislator, a statesman. 
He began his work in the lower branch of the 
State Legislature. He finished it in the high- 
est deliberative council in the republic. 

In 1886 Rayner resigned his seat in the 
State Senate to represent the Fourth Maryland 
District in the Fiftieth Congress. He retired 
from that body at the end of his two-year term, 
when the Republicans swept the State. He 
had been a candidate to succeed himself, and 
just before his death he related an amusing 
incident to the author of this volume in con- 
nection with his defeat. Barnes Compton, a 
Democratic colleague, had for years repre- 
sented the Fifth Maryland District in the 



268 Maryland in National Politics. 

House and was likewise seeking re-election. 
The two candidates met in Baltimore during 
the campaign. After exchanging greetings, 
each asked the other how the fight was pro- 
gressing. Rayner replied that he expected a 
little difficulty in overcoming his opposition. 
He said that the Republicans had nominated a 
young man by the name of Stockbridge, who 
was an obscure reporter on the Baltimore 
American and who had no standing whatever. 
Compton, on his part, remarked that the Fifth 
District Republicans had put up an unheard- 
of fellow by the name of Mudd, "Syd," he be- 
lieved they called him. There would be no 
trouble, Compton opined, in demolishing the 
unfamed Mudd. But when the returns were 
counted each of these over-confident candi- 
dates received the shock of his life. Stock- 
bridge was elected in the Fourth and Mudd 
in the Fifth District. The former has since 
taken his place on the Maryland Court of 
Appeals, and the latter for twenty years there- 
after was the dominant figure in Southern 
Maryland politics. 

Rayner, however, returned to the House 
two years later, serving for two terms. He at- 
tracted attention in that body from the begin- 
ning. His grasp of public questions, his wide 
knowledge of the law and his application of 



Maryland in National Politics. 269 

the Constitution to the pending problems gave 
him a measure of party leadership rarely ac- 
corded so young a member of the House. 
Henry Watterson, the distinguished editor, 
was present at the first speech this Marylander 
ever made in Congress, and in his report of the 
circumstance he ventured a prophesy worthy 
of one inspired. In his review of the Rayner 
speech, he said: 

"If I were asked to select the member of the 
Fiftieth Congress of the most marked intellectual 
force, I would, without hesitation, immediately name 
the Honorable Isidor Rayner, of Maryland. He is 
as profound and brilliant as Judah P. Benjamin, and, 
as an orator, has no superior in the Senate or the 
House of Representatives. His speech yesterday on 
the bill against the trusts captivated the House and 
took the galleries by storm. It compared favorably 
with anything that has been delivered in Congress 
since the giants of the Augustan Age. It was argu- 
ment and learning and eloquence combined with 
satire, and when it was delivered the most noisy body 
in the world became hushed. The members of the 
House, including Mr. Reed, leader of the Republi- 
cans, crowded about him. The spectators in the gal- 
leries leaned over in their seats, not to lose a word, 
and when he closed it was a perfectly useless task of 
the Speaker to control the applause that came from 
both sides of the House and the galleries." 



fc>' 



Rayner resumed the practice of law in Balti- 
more following his brief but brilliant service 
in the House, and did not again figure in pub- 



270 Maryland in National Politics. 

lie affairs until 1889, when he was elected At- 
torney-General of Maryland. Meantime, the 
Spanish War had been carried to a successful 
conclusion by the United States. Two great 
naval victories had been won. The Spanish 
army had been defeated. Peace had come up- 
on terms which we dictated. Cuba had been 
given her independence and the Philippines 
and Porto Rico had been ceded to this govern- 
ment. 

This brief but splendid conquest demon- 
strated the fact, however, that peace hath her 
conflicts no less than war. The triumph of 
American arms over Spanish oppression and 
Spanish butchery did not end the strife. The 
Spanish flag ceased to wave upon this hemis- 
phere and Spanish brutality ceased to flourish, 
but after them came cruelties of another sort 
and persecutions of a diflferent stamp. This 
aftermath of the Spanish war is the most de- 
plorable chapter in recent American history. 

And the story of this disgraceful affair, in- 
volving deliberate determination on the part 
of a national administration to destroy the hon- 
orable record of a gallant naval officer, brings 
us to the most interesting event in the life of 
Isidor Rayner. His single-handed fight against 
the conspirators won for him the applause of a 
grateful country, even as his efforts won for his 



Maryland in National Politics. 271 

distinguished client a popular verdict that no 
autocratic power could overrule. 

The essential facts around which the Samp- 
son-Schley controversy centered are known to 
all Americans. Admiral Sampson was com- 
mander-in-chief of the fleet sent by President 
McKinley to destroy a Spanish squadron lying 
at anchor in the harbor of Santiago. An ef- 
fective blockade of this harbor had been estab- 
lished by Sampson. Admiral Winfield S. 
Schley, a Marylander, was second in command 
of the blockading vessels. On the morning of 
July 3, 1898, Admiral Sampson sailed away 
from Santiago, aboard his flagship, to consult 
with army officers at Siboney upon a joint 
campaign for the capture of the port. 

Four hours afterward the Spanish fleet, un- 
der Admiral Cervera, steamed out of the har- 
bor to give battle to the American ships. Ad- 
miral Schley, as the senior oflicer, automatical- 
ly assumed command of the American fleet, 
and in the course of a three-hour battle de- 
stroyed the Spanish ships. By all the laws of 
naval warfare, Schley was entitled to the glory 
of that victory and, by the common consent of 
his countrymen, that glory was awarded to 
him. 

The chagrin felt by Admiral Sampson over 
his absence at such a time was profound, even 



272 Maryland in National Politics. 

though his absence was in obedience to orders 
from Washington. And in his misfortune he 
had the active sympathy of the whole navy. 
The country, too, would have joined in that la- 
ment had not a group of administration fac- 
tors, headed by Secretary of the Navy John D. 
Long, set about undermining Schley in the 
hope of exalting Sampson at the expense of 
the subordinate officer. But this wretched 
scheme reacted. Its authors miscalculated 
upon the sense of fairplay and common decen- 
cy animating every true American. Their 
plot, though buttressed by the verdict of a 
naval tribunal, failed miserably. 

The fact that the people as a whole took 
the side of Admiral Schley in a bitter service 
feud resulting from the Battle of Santiago, led 
the enemies of Schley into a concerted move- 
ment to destroy him. Even after the war was 
over they pursued him. Three years passed 
and still the schemers schemed and abused and 
slandered this brave old officer. Finally, the 
marplots resorted to a desperate expedient. 
They caused to be published in the nameof Ed- 
gar Stanton Maclay, a per diem laborer at the 
New York Navy Yard, a so-called history of 
the navy. In this Schley was attacked more 
viciously than any man had before dared as- 
sail him. This book, and the circumstances of 



Maryland in National Politics. 273 

its publication, forced the issue. The Ad- 
miral, unable to longer endure in silence the 
campaign of libel leveled at him, demanded 
of the Navy Department that a court of in- 
quiry be ordered to determine, in open court, 
whether he had blundered at Santiago, 
whether he had disobeyed orders before that 
battle and whether, in the operation of the 
flagship Brooklyn, he had actually retreated 
before the fire of the Spanish ships. These, 
in efifect, were the bases for the assaults upon 
the Admiral. 

This court was convened on the 12th of Sep- 
tember, 1 90 1, with Admiral George Dewey as 
president and Rear-Admirals L. A. Kimberly 
and Andrew E. K. Benham as members. Cap- 
tain Samuel C. Lemly, of the Navy, was desig- 
nated as Judge Advocate General. Isidor Ray- 
ner at once volunteered his services as counsel 
for Admiral Schley, neither asking nor re- 
ceiving a fee. This trial, the most memorable 
in the history of the American navy, contin- 
ued for three months. Though a civil law- 
yer and wholly unfamiliar, in the beginning, 
with naval technique, Rayner conducted a 
masterly defence of the naval officer. He ac- 
quired in an incredibly short time an amazing 
grasp of nautical detail and, to the astonish- 
ment of the court and the spectators, he was 

18 



274 Maryland in National Politics. 

able to meet the highly trained Judge Advo- 
cate General on common ground. The climax 
came, however, when Rayner presented his ar- 
gument. It was a powerful arraignment of 
Schley's traducers. His appeal for justice to 
an heroic officer thrilled the country as have 
few orations in all our history. His closing 
words are worthy of perpetuation for all time. 
He said: 

"Now, may it please the court, I have finished. 
Such a trial as this has never, to my knowledge, taken 
place in the history of the world. It seemed to my 
mind that the case had hardly opened with the testi- 
mony of Captain Higginson before it commenced to 
totter, and from day to day its visionary fabric has 
dissolved from view. When Captain Cook, their 
last witness, was put upon the stand, the entire struct- 
ure collapsed, and now, after the witnesses from our 
own ships, and the gallant Captain and crew of the 
Oregon, and Admiral Schley, have narrated their un- 
varnished tale, the whole tenement, with all its com- 
partments, from its foundation to its turret, has dis- 
integrated and lies like a mass of blackened ruins. 

"It has taken three years to reveal the truth. 
There is not a single word that has fallen from the 
tongue of a single witness, friend or foe, that casts 
a shadow of reflection upon the honored name of the 
hero of Santiago. He has never claimed the glory 
of that day. Let it be known, he has never claimed 
the honor of that day. No word to this effect has 
ever gone forth from him to the American people. 
The valiant Cook, the heroic Clark, the lamented 
Philip, the intrepid and undaunted Wainwright, and 
all the other captains, and every man at every gun, 



Maryland in National Politics. 275 

and every soul on board every ship are equal partici- 
pants with Admiral Schley in the honor wrought 
upon that immortal day. We cannot strike his fig- 
ure down, standing upon the bridge of the Brook- 
lyn. Says Boatswain Hill : 'Every head was bowed 
but his as the Spanish shot and shell fell thick and 
fast,' and sent the life blood streaming from young 
Ellis. 

''We cannot strike him down. 'You may assassi- 
nate me, but you cannot intimidate me,' said the 
Irish patriot Curran, as he turned upon his accusers 
and traducers. There he stands upon the bridge of 
the Brooklyn, his ship almost alone, receiving the en- 
tire fire of the Spanish fleet, until the Oregon, as if 
on the wings of lightning, sped into the thickness of 
this mortal carnage. 'God bless the Oregon,' was the 
cheer that rang from deck to deck ; and on they went, 
twin brothers in the chase, until the lee gun was fired 
from the Cristobal Colon and the despotic colors 
of Spain were swept from the face of her ancient 
possessions. 'Well done; congratulate you on the 
victory,' w^as the streamer that was sent forth from 
the halyard of the Brooklyn, and from that day to 
this no man has ever heard from Admiral Schley the 
slightest whisper or intimation that he has usurped 
the glory of that imperishable hour. The thunders 
of the Brooklyn, as she trembled on the waves, have 
been discordant music to the ears of envious foes, 
but they have pierced with ringing melody the ears 
of his countrymen, and struck a responsive chord at 
the fireside of every American home. And what is 
more than all which has been revealed in this case, 
as matchless as his courage, and as unsullied as his 
honor, is his beautiful character, the generous spirit 
that animates his soul, and the forgiving heart that 
beats within his bosom. 



276 Maryland in National Politics. 

"Yes, we cannot strike him down. Erect he 
stands as McGregor when his step was on his native 
heather, and his eye upon the peak of Ben Lomond. 
His country does not want to strike him down, nor 
cast a blur upon the pure escutcheon of his honored 
name. For three long years he has suffered, and 
now, thank God, he believes that the hour of his vin- 
dication has come. With composure, with resigna- 
tion, with supreme and unfaltering fortitude, he 
awaits the judgment of this illustrious tribunal. And 
if that deliverance comes, he can, from the high and 
exalted position which he occupies, look down upon 
his traducers and maligners and with exultant pride 
exclaim : 'I care not for the venomous gossip of clubs 
and drawing rooms, and cliques and cabals, nor the 
poisoned shafts of envy and of malice. I await, 
under guidance of Divine Providence, the verdict of 
posterity.' " 

Two of the three members of this court were, 
however, untouched, unmoved by his fervid 
invocation. They were adamant. Neither 
overwhelming testimony nor overpowering 
argument could influence them. They could 
only hear the demand that Schley be crucified, 
and to that demand they yielded. In their 
report they found the Admiral guilty of sub- 
stantially all that he had been accused of. 
Happily, however, there was one member of 
that court, Admiral Dewey, the highest naval 
authority in the land, who dared dissent. That 
grim old warrior knew the fibre of which he- 
roes are made. More than that, his voice was 



Maryland in National Politics. 277 

beyond the control of any set of detractors, 
official or otherwise. He found Schley inno- 
cent of every charge that had been made, and 
in that judgment the American people hear- 
tily concurred. 

A few years after this trial Isidor Rayner 
was sent to the United States Senate by the 
people of Maryland, to stay until death re- 
moved him. And a touching circumstance of 
his service there was the fact that his last pub- 
lic act, a speech on the floor of that body, 
was an appeal for an increased pension for the 
widow of the officer he had years before de- 
fended. In this address the Marylander took 
occasion to review the Battle of Santiago and 
to point to the fuller measure of vindication 
which history has accorded the hero of that 
engagement. In this, he said : 

"I do not intend to enter upon a description of the 
conduct of Schley at Santiago, but it seems to me 
that this is the proper occasion, and I propose to avail 
myself of it, to show that the famous order for what 
is known as the 'loop' of the Brooklyn that Schley 
gave upon the spur of the moment and in the heat of 
battle, decided the conflict and saved the day for the 
American arms. It was a triumph of naval and nauti- 
cal skill. Its scope was entirely grasped by Admiral 
Dewey, when he declined to concur in the opinion of 
the remaining Admirals who sat with him upon the 
tribunal that decided the case. 



278 Maryland in National Politics. 

"Admiral Sampson, before he left for Siboney, 
gave the order to his fleet to close in upon the Spanish 
ships in the event they made an effort to come out 
of the harbor of Santiago. Sampson, with all his 
great skill and experience as a naval commander, 
could not possibly have foreseen what the Spanish 
plan of battle would be. The Brooklyn, Schley's 
flagship, w^as steering a course diametrically oppo- 
site to that steered by the Spanish fleet, and in their 
attempt to escape the Spanish squadron had practi- 
cally broken through and passed the battleship line, 
creating an emergency that no one could have fore- 
seen and which had to be met immediately. The 
commander of the Maria Teresa, the leading ship of 
the Spanish fleet, intended to ram the Brooklyn, in 
accordance with the Spanish plan of battle. Not 
only this, but, owing to the new situation, there was 
danger of collision among the American ships, and 
Cook immediately sent word to Schley that 'We will 
soon be in the crossfire of our own fleet.' It was 
then that Cook gave the order 'hard aport' and the 
Brooklyn swung rapidly around to the west a little 
more than half her tactical diameter, and Sears, the 
flag lieutenant of the Brooklyn, was ordered by Ad- 
miral Schley to hoist the signal 'Follow the Flag.' 
Then, with Clark of the Oregon upon the Brooklyn's 
quarter, the most terrific fighting of the day began. 
In a short time smoke was seen issuing from the 
port and hatches of the Maria Teresa, the leading 
Spanish ship. The smoke from the Brooklyn had 
blinded the crew so that they could not see what was 
going on. 'Keep the boys informed,' said Schley to 
Cook, and the ringing cheers came back until the 
Maria Teresa, leaping from fire into flame, burning 
fore and aft, turned into the beach six miles west of 
Santiago harbor. Then the Brooklyn, receiving 
more shells and inflicting as much damage as the 



Maryland in National Politics. 279 

whole of the American fleet combined, went west- 
ward on her course in pursuit of the remaining 
Spanish ships, until fire was seen issuing from the 
Oqnendo, the second vessel of the Spanish fleet, and 
with the Oregon, and Brooklyn in pursuit, she was 
beached within a half mile of where the Maria Teresa 
gave up the fight. 

"Then came the Viscaya, and in her flight and her 
despair, she made a desperate turn towards the 
Brooklyn and the Oregon, but as she did this she 
was struck by a shell from one of the vessels and, 
hauling her colors down, she was beached at Acer- 
raderos. There it was that Ellis, struck by a shell, 
fell upon the Brooklyn at the side of Schley, and as 
his lifeless body was about to be cast overboard, 
Schley gave the order, 'Bring the body back and we 
will give it a Christian burial.' The Colon, the last 
of the enemy ships, was then making toward the 
Torquino River. Schley signaled the Oregon to 
try her 13-inch guns upon the fleeing vessel, and 
with the combined fire of the Brooklyn and Oregon 
upon the ship, with no possible chance of escape and 
with her human cargo doomed to certain death if 
the fighting continued, her commander ran his ship 
ashore, fired his lee gun, lowered his flag, and the 
colors of Spain went down before the colors of the 
Union upon the western hemisphere." 

When Isidor Rayner took his seat in the 
Senate that branch of Congress had ceased to 
be a representative body. It was in the hands 
of a mere handful of men, who knew exactly 
what they wanted and exactly how to get it. 
Autocracy was rampant. The leadership of 
Aldrich, Allison, Foraker, Spooner, Hale and 



28o Maryland in National Politics. 

Frye had just attained its fullest sway. The 
notorious oligarchy of which they were the 
spokesmen legislated openly and shamelessly 
in behalf of special interests. Lately removed 
from that stubborn and chastening opposition 
led by Vance and Harris, and Morgan and 
Blackburn, and Gorman and Voorhees, this 
combination ruled the Senate and, through it, 
ruled Congress with a power more sweeping 
than any exercised by a single group of men 
in the history of the republic. Great changes 
impended, however. Far-reaching reforms 
were gathering force, and the fall of this reg- 
ime ultimately came, just as it was ordained. 
But it did not decline until an aroused public 
sentiment hastened to the support of such men 
as Rayner and Borah and Dolliver and Bev- 
eridge and Lafollette — men who could fight 
and did fight with fists of iron. 

And, coincident with the rise of Senate ab- 
solutism, there developed yet another danger 
threatening the order established more than a 
century before by the Constitution. This was 
the brazen usurpation of prerogative by the 
Executive, the centralization of authority in a 
personal magistrate. It was the attempt to 
"convert an abstract sovereignty into a con- 
crete sovereign." This latter-day school of 
centralizers of twentieth-century Federalists, 



Maryland in National Politics. 281 

of New Nationalists, was headed and tailed by 
Theodore Roosevelt. As President, he had 
sought to govern with a power unqualified, un- 
limited, plenary, and in this ambition he was 
supported by all those idealists who regarded 
the Presidency as an office over which the 
courts had no restraint and Congress no con- 
trol. The determined effort to wipe out the 
lines between State and National authority, 
and to destroy the relationship between the 
legislative and executive branches of the gov- 
ernment presented a grave situation. 

Isidor Rayner arrayed himself against these 
evils as soon as he entered the Senate. He de- 
nounced them with a vehemence that stirred 
the whole country. He found the old Consti- 
tution which he had sworn to uphold in disre- 
pute. He found it encroached upon or scoffed 
at on every side. He found Congress, on the 
one hand, enacting legislation for which there 
was no authority under the organic law, and 
found the President, on the other, appropriat- 
ing powers never granted to the executive 
branch of the government. He found the doc- 
trine of States' rights candidly ignored. He 
found the sanctity of the courts invaded. He 
found the administrative departments making 
and executing treaties with foreign govern- 
ments without either the advice or consent of 



282 Maryland in National Politics. 

the Senate. He found the ancient Monroe 
Doctrine revived and extended as a cloak to 
cover a multitude of sins. 

Observing these things, Rayner immediate- 
ly found a field for labor and threw himself 
into the contest with a passionate enthusiasm. 
He had studied constitutional law as it had 
been taught by Thomas Jefferson, by James 
Madison and John Randolph Tucker. He 
had taken his interpretations of that law from 
Marshall, from Taney and from Story, and, 
fortified by these authorities, he combated 
with all his might the dangerous tendencies to 
which Congress was yielding and to which 
even the country was becoming reconciled. 
He thundered day after day against the liber- 
ties that were being taken with the fundamen- 
tal instrument. He denounced every invasion 
of the reserved rights of the States. He de- 
clared with all the force he could command 
that the federal government was endowed 
with delegated and not with inherent powers. 
He fought against every move that was made 
by the Senate to legislate under the meaning- 
less "General Welfare Clause" of the Consti- 
tution, that blanket excuse for anything and 
everything on earth. 

Again and again this Marylander was taunt- 
ed because of his old-fashioned devotion to the 



Maryland in National Politics. 283 

Constitution. And to this impeachment he 
never failed to respond with a plea of guilty. 
He was devoted to the Constitution and he 
gloried in the fact. Neither derision, nor scorn, 
nor ridicule could move him. He believed 
that the future of the Republic could only be 
safeguarded by the strictest adherence to that 
charter. He believed that the checks and bal- 
ances which it imposed were essential to the 
perpetuity of representative government. He 
believed that any wilful disregard of the basic 
law would be fraught with the most serious 
consequences. He sadly deplored the fact 
that the people were showing a willingness to 
turn from the written work to a collection of 
apocryphal constructions as a refuge and a re- 
lief from restraints fixed when the government 
was founded. 

Senator Rayner did not, however, confine 
his influence or his discussion to domestic 
matters. These were of deeper concern to 
him, it is true, but his interest went further. 
It extended to every issue between this and a 
foreign country. He made an exhaustive ex- 
amination of international aflfairs and the gen- 
eral law of nations. He studied closely the 
relations between the United States and other 
governments and, though a member of the mi- 
nority party during his entire service in the 



284 Maryland in National Politics. 

Senate, he had a powerful influence upon the 
foreign policies of three administrations. His 
review of the limitations upon the treaty-mak- 
ing power under the Constitution, for instance, 
was one of the most profound arguments to 
which the Senate ever listened upon that ques- 
tion. His definition of the scope and meaning 
of the Monroe Doctrine was another monu- 
ment to his acumen as a practical interpreter 
of international law. His appeal to the Sen- 
ate for a termination of the Russian Treaty 
was answered by an overwhelming vote in fa- 
vor of abrogation. His assault upon the ad- 
ministration's policy toward Santo Domingo 
resulted in an instant reversal of that policy 
and in a special message of apology from 
President Roosevelt. 

Throughout his whole career, from first to 
last. Senator Rayner was an apostle of peace. 
He preached it in season and out. He called 
upon the United States time and again to take 
the lead among the nations of the earth for the 
arbitration of international disputes. He sup- 
ported every step in this direction, whether it 
originated in Congress or out of it. To him 
war, as a means of settling controversies be- 
tween governments, was nothing more or less 
than a return to barbarism. He could see no 
sense or sanity in the human sacrifices it en- 



Maryland in National Politics. 285 

tailed or the misery and desolation that fol- 
lowed in its wake. War was, in his judgment, 
simply organized and legalized murder, 
though '^clad in martial pomp." It was bru- 
talized savagery, though exalted in history and 
glorified in tradition. And he verily believed 
that the time would come when armed conflict 
would be banished from the earth and "cease 
to be a mockery of religion's holiest offices, a 
defiance of the Providence of God." 

Another article in Senator Rayner's faith 
was an abiding respect for the duly constituted 
courts and a deference to their judgments. No 
man in public life in his day was more zealous 
in his defence of the judiciary. No man stood 
oftener between it and that distrust encour- 
aged by those who sought by insidious means 
to subordinate the processes of justice to po- 
litical expediency. No man fought harder to 
protect these tribunals from every influence 
tending to prostitute their machinery by mak- 
ing it responsive to public clamor. He be- 
lieved that the courts were a bulwark which, 
once broken down, would mean the end of con- 
stitutional government. He did not believe 
them infallible, but he did believe that their 
functions should be inviolate and that any in- 
terference with them from the Executive or 
from Congress was a crime against the people 



286 Maryland in National Politics. 

whose rights and property were in their keep- 
ing. 

Senator Rayner died just as a triumphant 
Democracy came into authority in every 
branch of the government, just as the princi- 
ples and policies for which he had contended 
were being given a vote of approval and confi- 
dence by the country. Had he lived he would 
have become one of the ablest spokesmen of 
the new regime. He would have done his 
part in carrying into effect the pledges which 
had swept his party into power. 



Maryland in National Politics. 287 

CONCLUSION 

1775— 1915 

In fixing the relationship of Maryland 
statesmen, diplomatists, jurists and warriors to 
the important events in American history, the 
commanding figures of Hanson, Carroll, Mc- 
Henry, Martin, Chase, Smith, Pinkney, Wirt, 
Taney, Johnson, Davis, Blair, Gorman and 
Rayner stand out in bold relief. They were 
leading actors in the great drama of our na- 
tional politics and were awarded high rank in 
the councils of the Republic. Yet a narrative 
of their part in establishing and maintaining 
a system of constitutional government on the 
Western Continent does not tell the whole 
story of the State's determining influence upon 
our destiny as a nation. 

As a matter of fact, the names of Maryland- 
ers are honorably associated with every period 
and every crisis through which the country has 
passed since independence was achieved in 
America. They were at the front when the 
immortal Declaration was signed; when the 
Constitutional Convention met ; when the War 
of 1812 was forced upon us; when rebellion 
threatened dismemberment of the Union; 



288 Maryland in National Politics. 

when Spain was driven from this hemisphere. 
Men of the State have figured in Presidential 
contests; they have occupied seats in twenty 
Cabinets; they have sat upon the highestcourt; 
they have been leaders in the House and Sen- 
ate ; they have represented their government in 
practically every court and capital in the 
world, and have served gallantly in every war 
we have waged against a foreign foe. They 
have been history-makers from first to last, 
and it is difficult to comprehend their public 
services, even briefly, in one volume. 

While it is true that only two Marylanders 
ever received a party nomination for the 
Presidency — William Wirt in 1832, and 
Joshua Levering in 1896 — five others received 
votes in the Electoral College for this high 
office. In the very first contest, that of 1789, 
R. H. Harrison, of Maryland, was given six 
ballots. Washington was overwhelmingly 
elected, as was John Adams eight years later, 
though in the latter contest John Henry, a 
Senator from Maryland, received two votes. 
John Eager Howard, though in no sense a 
candidate, received the highest electoral vote 
ever cast for a Marylander when, in 1816, this 
ardent Federalist was given 22 ballots. Rob- 
ert Goodloe Harper, also of Maryland, was, 



Maryland in National Politics. 289 

in the same election, complimented with three 
votes. 

In those days the party convention was an 
unknown institution. Party candidates were 
nominated by partisan caucuses, in which only 
the members of the House and Senate had a 
voice. As a result of this system, the same ob- 
ligation was not felt by electors in so far as a 
party ticket was concerned, and it was a com- 
mon practice on the part of members of the 
Electoral College to vote as they pleased. 
Later on the caucus nomination plan was 
abandoned, as was that of awarding the Vice- 
Presidency to the Presidential candidate re- 
ceiving the second highest electoral vote. 
Party conventions had been established when 
William Wirt made his campaign on the anti- 
Masonic ticket against Jackson and Clay, and 
were firmly fixed in our system when Joshua 
Levering was named to head the Prohibition 
party in 1896. William Daniel, a Prohibi- 
tionist, was the only Marylander ever duly 
nominated for the Vice-Presidency. He was 
the party candidate for that office in 1884. 

A long and distinguished line of Maryland 
statesmen have held positions in Presidential 
Cabinets. Of the services of James McHenry, 
Secretary of War under Washington and Ad- 
ams; William Pinkney and William Wirt, 

19 



290 Maryland in National Politics. 

Attorney-Generals under Madison and Mon- 
roe, respectively; Roger B. Taney, Attorney- 
General and Secretary of the Treasury under 
Jackson ; Reverdy Johnson, Attorney-General 
under Taylor, and Montgomery Blair, Post- 
master-General under Lincoln, this review 
has already concerned itself. Many other 
Marylanders were, however, placed at the 
head of the executive departments of the fed- 
eral government. 

The career of Robert Smith was unusually 
eventful. He was the only representative of 
the State in all history to occupy three Cabinet 
offices, and the only one ever named Secretary 
of State. He was a brother of General Sam- 
uel Smith, veteran soldier and legislator, and 
had served in numerous State offices prior to 
the beginning of the Jeflferson administration. 
Shortly after Jefiferson assumed office, Benja- 
min Stoddert, his Secretary of the Navy, re- 
signed. The navy at that time consisted of a 
few old frigates, survivors of the Revolution- 
ary War, and the naval portfolio was not a 
coveted office. Dr. Samuel E. Forman, in his 
"Advanced American History," says that Jef- 
ferson found it necessary to advertise in the 
newspapers for a successor to Stoddert. At all 
events, Robert Smith was given the place and 



Maryland in National Politics. 291 

remained at the head of the department for 
four years. 

Toward the close of Jefiferson's regime 
Smith was promoted to the Attorney-General- 
ship, an office held by him until Madison was 
inaugurated. Madison, in making an effort to 
win the support in the Senate of General Sam- 
uel Smith, bargained with the Maryland Sen- 
ator for the appointment of the Attorney-Gen- 
eral to the Premiership in the new adminis- 
tration. Robert Smith was named Secretary 
of State in 1809, and handled the delicate ne- 
gotiations with Great Britain and France im- 
mediately preceding the War of 1812. A 
deadly feud arose in the Madison Cabinet be- 
tween Smith and Albert Gallatin, resulting, 
finally, in Smith's forced resignation. He was 
offered the Legation at St. Petersburg, but de- 
clined it. He returned to his law practice in 
Baltimore, and did not again figure in national 
affairs. 

Benjamin Stoddert, who had preceded 
Smith as Secretary of the Navy, also was a 
Marylander. He had fought heroically in 
the Revolutionary Army and, after being se- 
verely wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, 
became Secretary of the Board of War under 
the Continental Congress. He was appointed 
by President Adams to succeed George Cabot 



292 Maryland in National Politics. 

as Secretary of the Navy, and was the second 
man to fill that office. He was, in reality, the 
father of the American Navy, being the first 
official to formate a naval force for the infant 
government. He was transferred by Adams 
from the Navy to the War Department, anrl 
acted as Secretary of War until the Jefferson 
administration was launched. 

Many of Maryland's ablest lawyers have 
been Attorney-Generals of the United States. 
In all, seven have occupied that high office, 
more than any other State can boast of. John 
Nelson was the fifth representative of the State 
to become the chief law officer of the govern- 
ment. He first appeared in the national arena 
in 1 82 1, when he was elected to the House of 
Representatives from the Western Maryland 
District. Ten years afterward President Jack 
son appointed him Minister to the Court of 
Naples and, in the Cabinet reorganization fol- 
lowing the death of William Henry Harrison, 
President Tyler invited the Marylander to 
take the Attorney-Generalship. Nelson ac- 
cepted the office and served until 1845. 

But one instance is of record in which a 
Marylander was tendered a Cabinet position, 
was nominated and confirmed, and then de- 
clined the honor. To James Alfred Pearce, 
father of Judge Pearce, of the Maryland Court 



Maryland in National Politics. 293 

of Appeals, belongs this unique distinction. 
He had become a member of the House of 
Representatives in 1833 and had served eight 
years in that body, when he was elected to the 
United States Senate in 1843. In 1850 Presi- 
dent Fillmore urged Senator Pearce to become 
Secretary of the Interior. Without waiting 
for a definite acceptance of this tender, the 
President sent the name of the Marylander to 
the Senate and it was promptly confirmed. At 
once Senator Pearce notified the President 
that he could not qualify for the position, and, 
though the official records place him in the 
Fillmore Cabinet, the fact is, he never assumed 
the duties of the position. Fillmore also of- 
fered the Senator a seat on the United States 
Circuit Court of Maryland, but this, too, was 
declined. 

John P. Kennedy was the third Marylander 
to become Secretary of the Navy. Twice a 
member of Congress from the State and at one 
time Speaker of the House of Delegates, he 
had become widely known before President 
Fillmore, in 1852, offered him the Navy port- 
folio. This was accepted and his adminis- 
tration of that department was marked by two 
memorable expeditions. It was through the 
efforts of Secretary Kennedy that Commodore 
Perry's fleet sailed to Japan and paved the way 



294 Maryland in National Politics. 

for Occidental civilization that has since been 
embraced by that country. The Arctic explo- 
rations of Dr. E. K. Kane were also organized 
by Kennedy. After retirement to private life 
the Marylander achieved further fame in lit- 
erary fields. His "Life of William Wirt" is a 
classic among American biographies. 

Maryland has never produced a morepictur- 
esque character than Philip Francis Thomas, 
Secretary of the Treasury for an even month 
during the last year of Buchanan's adminis- 
tration. No representative of his State ever 
occupied more public offices under the federal 
government, save, perhaps, William Pinkney. 
And Pinkney's record is broken if Thomas' 
State offices are considered. It is a curious 
circumstance, too, that this Marylander prob- 
ably declined more positions of an important 
character than any man from any State before 
or after him. 

The career of Philip Francis Thomas began 
in 1836, when he was elected a member of the 
Constitutional Convention of that year. He 
was, thereafter, a member of the House of 
Delegates five separate times, twice a member 
of the federal House of Representatives, with 
an interim of 35 years; was Governor of his 
State Judge of the Land Office Court, Comp- 
troller of the United States Treasury, Collec- 



Maryland in National Politics. 295 

tor of the Port of Baltimore, Commissioner of 
Patents, Secretary of the Treasury and a Sena- 
tor of the United States. It is, indeed, diffi- 
cult to find a parallel for such a record, and 
impossible to find one, when it is remembered 
that Governor Thomas declined the office of 
Treasurer of the United States, the Secretary- 
ship of the Navy under Pierce, the Governor- 
ship of the Territory of Utah during the Mor- 
mon War, and a second election as United 
States Senator. 

Governor Thomas became Secretary of the 
Treasury in i860, after being repeatedly urged 
by President Buchanan to accept the portfolio. 
The Marylander remained in that office but 
thirty days. War between the North and 
South was seen to be inevitable, and Thoma?, 
whose sympathies were all Southern, felt that 
he would be out of place in a Cabinet office at 
such a time. He therefore withdrew, return- 
ing to his home in Easton to again take up the 
practice of law. He did not himself go into 
the Southern army, but his son volunteered. 
That circumstance deprived the father of a 
seat in the Senate, a seat to which he had been 
constitutionally elected. He presented his 
credentials at the bar of that body in 1868, but 
they were rejected by a vote of 27 to 20, on the 
ground that the Senator-elect had given aid 



296 Maryland in National Politics. 

and comfort to the Rebellion by supplying his 
son with clothing. 

John A. J. Creswell served for five years in 
the Cabinet of President Grant. He was ap- 
pointed Postmaster-General in 1869, at the 
very beginning of the new regime. He was 
forced out of the Cabinet in 1874 by reason of 
political prejudices associated with his early 
record as a Democrat. Creswell had been :i 
stanch Democrat until the convention that 
nominated Lincoln. When it became evident 
that the old party was in sympathy with the 
South, Creswell left it and united with the 
new organization. As in the case of Mont- 
gomery Blair, the sincerity of this change was 
never granted by the South-hating radicals. 
Each of these distinguished Marylanders was 
pursued by political harpies until forced into 
retirement. Before becoming Postmaster- 
General Creswell had served honorably in 
both the House and Senate. 

General James A. Gary never held a politi- 
cal office until he accepted a commission as 
Postmaster-General in McKinley's Cabinet. 
He had devoted his energies exclusively to 
private business, and his success in that was a 
token of the kind of administration he would 
give the greatest business institution in the 
world, the postal system of the United States. 



Maryland in National Politics. 297 

General Gary's health gave way within a year 
of his appointment, however, and he did not 
remain in office long enough to see the fruition 
of the reforms which he inaugurated. 

The last Marylander to sit in a Presidential 
Cabinet was Charles J. Bonaparte. He was 
appointed Secretary of the Navy by President 
Roosevelt in 1905, and was two years later 
transferred to theAttorney-Generalship. Like 
General Gary, Mr. Bonaparte had not been a 
seeker of public favors, but had been an ardent 
reformer in politics and civic affairs. It was 
Attorney-General Bonaparte's fortune to car- 
ry into effect the Roosevelt anti-trust policy. 
During his two-year term as head of the De- 
partment of Justice the foundation was laid 
for the Standard Oil and American Tobacco 
Trust decisions of the Supreme Court, deci- 
sions that have given new life to the Sherman 
Act. 

Four Marylanders have sat upon the Su- 
preme Court of the United States. Thomas 
Johnson, Samuel Chase, Gabriel Duvall and 
Roger B. Taney form that group of learned 
jurists. With the stormy careers of Chase and 
Taney, this review has already had much to 
say. The former was impeached before the 
Senate of the United States, but was acquitted 
through the masterly defence of Luther Mar- 



298 Maryland in National Politics. 

tin. Taney was named as Chief Justice in 
1836 and occupied that exalted position until 
1864, a longer period than it was held by any 
other man, with the single exception of John 
Marshall. 

Thomas Johnson is, perhaps, the only man 
in all our history who has ever declined the 
Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Court, and 
one of the few men in public life who refused 
to become Secretary of State. He was one of 
the deputies from Maryland in the first Con- 
tinental Congress, and nominated General 
Washington for Commander-in-Chief of the 
Revolutionary Army. After independence 
had been declared and the colony of Maryland 
assumed the status of a State, Johnson became 
its first Governor. General Washington 
named him an Associate Justice of the United 
States Supreme Court in 1791. When Chief 
Justice Rutledge resigned, his nomination hav- 
ing failed of confirmation, President Wash- 
ington tendered the vacant post to the Mary- 
lander. This was not accepted for the reason 
that Johnson had made his plans to retire from 
the bench. This he did in 1793. Almost im- 
mediately thereafter the President urged Gov- 
ernor Johnson to become Premier of his Cabi- 
net. Again he declined. 



Maryland in National Politics. 299 

The service of Gabriel Duvall on the Su- 
preme Court was of longer duration. He was 
elevated to the highest court by President 
Madison in 181 1, and remained upon the 
bench until 1836, when he resigned on account 
of increasing infirmities. His first public ap- 
pearance was as a member of the House of 
Representatives, to which body he was elected 
in 1794. He resigned in 1796, to become one 
of the judges of the Supreme Court of Mary- 
land. In 1802 he was named as Comptroller 
of the Treasury, occupying that position until 
appointed to the Supreme Court. 

Maryland has had an illustrious part in the 
diplomatic history of the nation. Her sons 
have represented this Republic in almost every 
capital in the world. The record of their 
services begins as early as 1777. In that year 
William Carmichael became Secretary to the 
American Commission to France, the commis- 
sion that effected the intervention of that gov- 
ernment in behalf of the American Revolution. 
In 1790 Carmichael became Charge at Ma- 
drid, and nine years later Secretary of our Le- 
gation to Spain. 

William Vans Murray was appointed Min- 
ister to The Netherlands in 1797 and re- 
mained there until 1801. In 1819 Christo- 
pher Hughes began his diplomatic career 



300 Maryland in National Politics. 

when he was named Charge to Norway and 
Sweden. He became Minister to The Neth- 
erlands in 1825, Minister to Norway in 1830, 
and was again sent to The Netherlands in 
1842. David Porter presented his credentials 
as Minister to Turkey in 1831, and continued 
at that post until he died in 1843. John Nel- 
son, afterward a Cabinet officer, served for 
one year, in 1831, as Charge to the Sicilies, 
and a little later Virgil Maxcy became Charge 
to Belgium. Daniel Jenifer was made Min- 
ister to Austria Hungary in 1841, serving 
for four years. Carroll Spence was for four 
years Minister to Turkey, beginning with 
1853. I" 1858 James M. Buchanan was sent 
as Minister to Denmark, and in 1851 John B. 
Kerr took charge of our Legation in Nicara- 
gua. James R. Partridge went upon his first 
mission, as Minister to Honduras in 1862. 
Subsequently he was Minister to Salvador, to 
Venezuela, Peru and Brazil. 

Three distinguished Marylanders have been 
accredited by this government to the Court of 
St. James. William Pinkney was the first. 
He succeeded Monroe as Minister and re- 
mained in London until the beginning of the 
War of 181 2. In 1868 Reverdy Johnson was 
assigned to the same court, remaining there 
two years. The last Maryland diplomat to 



Maryland in National Politics. 301 

accept this mission was Louis McLane, who 
served as Minister from 1845 to 1846. 

Robert M. McLane was appointed Minis- 
ter to France in 1885 by President Cleveland, 
and continued in Paris until Harrison was 
elected. He had served two years as Minister 
to Mexico, from 1859 to i860. Thomas B. 
Ferguson was named as Minister to Norway 
in 1894, serving for a period of three years, 
and Joseph W. J. Lee was Minister to Hon- 
duras and Guatemala from 1905 to 1908. 

The State has been brilliantly represented 
in the Diplomatic Corps of more recent times. 
Henry White was Ambassador to France from 
1906 to 1909, and yet remains the only diplo- 
mat of ambassadorial rank accorded to Mary- 
land. The Legations at London, Paris, Rome 
and other great European capitals had not 
been raised to Embassies in the days of the 
McLanes. John W. Garrett, who became 
Minister to Venezuela in 19 10, and later Min- 
ister to Argentina, would have become an Am- 
bassador if conditions had permitted his re- 
turn to Buenos Ayres. John Ridgeley Car- 
ter, after service as Minister to the Balkan 
States, was named as Minister to Argentina, 
preceding Mr. Garrett at that post. Theodore 
Marburg was the last diplomatic representa- 
tive to be appointed from the State. He was 



302 Maryland in National Politics. 

made Minister to Belgium in 191 2, returning 
to this country in 1913. 

Many of Maryland's ablest men have served 
her in the House and Senate of the United 
States. The list of names is a long one, and 
the record of their public services still longer. 
From the days of Joseph H. Nicholson, Philip 
Barton Key, John P. Kennedy, Henry Winter 
Davis, Charles B. Calvert, Robert M. Mc- 
Lane, Thomas P. Bowie and Thomas Swann, 
down to the period of Sydney E. Mudd, J. 
Fred C. Talbott, J. Harry Covington and 
David J. Lewis, Marylanders have occupied 
positions of leadership in the federal House 
of Representatives. 

And the same is true of the Senate. Charles 
Carroll, John Eager Howard, John Henry, 
Samuel Smith, Robert H. Goldsborough, 
Alexander C. Hanson, William Pinkney, 
James Alfred Pearce, Reverdy Johnson, John 
A. J. Creswell, Arthur P. Gorman, George L. 
Wellington, William Pinkney Whyte, Isidor 
Rayner and John Walter Smith were Senators 
whose names stand out boldly in the annals of 
a century's legislation. 

Senator Whyte enjoyed a rare distinction in 
the Senate. He entered the upper branch of 
Congress in 1868, three years after the close 
of the Civil War, and closed his final serv- 



Maryland in National Politics. 303 

ice in that body just forty years later. Three 
separate periods of service marked his long 
and honored career as a Senator, and the only 
parallel of that record is found in the case of 
Henry Clay. During his term, from 1875 to 
1 88 1, Senator Whyte was a powerful factor in 
party councils, and took high rank as a de- 
bater and constructive legislator. He was suc- 
ceeded by Arthur P. Gorman, whom he in 
turn succeeded when the latter died in 1906. 

[The End.^ 



